94 NATURAL SCIENCE. Feb., 



by still poorer feeding to only one foot in height, their heads 

 and jaws being diminished in still greater proportion. Yet these 

 starvelings appear to be just as sound and healthy and as perfectly 

 fitted in all details to their place in the social economy as the queens 

 and males. Can we suppose that insufficient nutrition caused the 

 neuters among termites and in various species of ants to become 

 quite blind as well as wingless, while it had no such effect on the 

 wings and eyesight of neuter bees and wasps ? Will degree or quality 

 of nutrition account for variations such as have turned two eyes 

 into a single eye placed in the middle of the head, as happens in one 

 caste, and in the one caste only, of certain ants ? Of course, there 

 will be some determining circumstance which decides what sex and 

 caste each egg shall develop; and some of the varying suscepti- 

 bilities of growing organisms to the influence of food might well be 

 seized upon by Natural Selection, and might be intensified, corrected, 

 and adaptively perfected. 3 But such an attainment of specialised 

 fitness would be complex adaptation of instincts and organs in neuter 

 insects b}^ Natural Selection — a process which is hardly separable 

 from the form of evolution which Mr. Spencer holds to be practically 

 impossible. 



If, as Mr. Spencer must assume, the workers, warriors, living 

 honey-pots, and so forth, inherit their positive characteristics from 

 fertile ancestors, in whom they were first developed, why has there 

 been no similar transmission of the long-continued decay and dis- 

 appearance of such capacities and structures in queens and drones ? 

 If the effects of use were transmitted, why are not the effects of disuse 

 transmitted ? If, in spite of underfeeding, the neuters, and the neuters 

 alone, continue to inherit the former capacities of the richly-fed queen, 

 why do they not inherit her present incompetence and inferiority ? 

 Surely underfeeding does not strictly preserve complicated instincts 

 and massive organs which are no longer possessed or exercised by 

 parents. It cannot be so discriminative or adaptive as this. Natural 

 Selection has to be brought in as the only factor capable of thus 

 counteracting the inherited effects of parental disuse. And if Natural 

 Selection can effect complicated and discriminative preservation, why 

 cannot it effect advance ? If it can maintain innumerable structures 

 of brain and body at a high level of efficiency in many essential points, 

 in spite of the otherwise disastrous effects of parental disuse, why 



* Mr. Spencer thinks that the sex of the drones is determined bj' the defective 

 nourishment of the queen, whereas, in the case of bees, experimental observation 

 shows that all unfertilised eggs yield drones, and that for a long time after fertilisa- 

 tion the queen appears to have the power of determining the sex of the eggs she 

 lays — the female eggs developing, of course, into queens or neuters according to the 

 food and treatment they receive. In the case of termites, Bates concludes that the 

 soldiers and workers are distinct from the egg, and that the differences in these 

 castes do not arise from any difference of food or treatment during their earlier 

 stages. M. Lespes believes that he found imperfect males and females in each of 

 these castes. 



