THE ANT-COLONY AS AN ORGANISM aut 
such a manner as to utilize the solar radiation to the utmost. 
In the Alps and Rocky Mountains we find the nests oriented in such 
a manner that the portions in which the brood is reared face south 
or east, and as time goes on the nests often grow slowly in these 
directions, like plants turning to the light, so that they become 
greatly elongated. This orientation is, in fact, so constant in some 
species that the Swiss mountaineers, when lost in a fog, can use it 
as a compass. 
Every complete ant-colony, moreover, has a definite stature 
which depends, of course, on the number of its component persons. 
And this stature, like that of personal organisms, varies greatly 
with the species and is not determined exclusively by the amount 
of food, but also by the queen mother’s fertility, which is constitu- 
tional. Certain ants live in affluence but are nevertheless unable 
to form colonies of more than fifty or a hundred individuals, while 
others, under the same conditions, have a personnel of thousands 
or tens of thousands. 
One of the most general structural peculiarities of the person 
is the duality of its composition as expressed in the germ-plasm on 
the one hand and the soma on the other, and the same is true of 
the ant-colony, in which the mother queen and the virgin males 
and females represent the germ-plasm, or, more accurately speak- 
ing, the ‘Keimbahn,’ while the normally sterile females, or workers 
and soldiers, in all their developmental stages, represent the soma. 
In discussing the question of the inheritance or non-inheritance of 
acquired characters the Neodarwinians trace all the congenital 
modifications of the worker and soldier phases to the queen, 
just as in the personal organism all the congenital somatic char- 
acters are traced to the germ-plasm of the egg. Since the homo- 
logue of the reproductive organ of the ant-colony consists of the 
virgin males and females, and since the males mature earlier than 
the females, the colony may be regarded as a protandric hermaph- 
rodite. Some colonies, however—and this is probably charac- 
teristic of certain species—produce only males or females and are 
therefore in a sense gonochoristic, or dicecious. And this protan- 
dric hermaphroditism and gonochorism, like the corresponding 
conditions in persons, may be interpreted as a device for, or, at 
