THE ANT-COLONY AS AN ORGANISM 319 
tion in the affirmative. If the worker personnel be removed from 
a young ant-colony, leaving only the fertile queen, we find that 
this insect, if provided with a sufficiently voluminous fat-body, 
will set to work and rear another brood, or, in other words, re- 
generate the missing soma. And, of course, any portion of the 
worker or sexual personnel, that is removed from a vigorous colony 
will be readily replaced by development of a corresponding portion 
of the brood. On the other hand, if the queen alone be removed, 
one of the workers will often develop its ovaries and take on the 
egg-laying function of the queen. In ants such substitution 
queens, or gynaecoid workers are not fertilized and are therefore 
unable to assume their mother’s worker- and queen-producing 
functions. The termites, however, show a remarkable provision 
for restituting both of the fertile parents of the colony from the 
so-called complemental males and females. In ants we have a 
production of fertile from normally infertile individuals, but the 
incompleteness of the result does not disprove the existence of a 
pronounced restitutional tendency. 
Very striking examples of this tendency are exhibited when 
colonies are injured by parasitic myrmecophiles. I shall consider 
only the case of the peculiar beetle Lomechusa strumosa, which 
breeds in colonies of the blood-red slave-maker (Formica san- 
guinea). Though the beetle and its larve are treated with great 
affection, the latter devour the ant larve in great numbers, 
so that little of the brood survives during the early summer months 
when the colony is producing its greatest annual increment to the 
worker personnel. The ants seem to perceive this defect and en- 
deavor to remedy it by converting all the surviving queen larve 
into workers. But as these larve have passed the stage in their 
development when such an operation can be successful, the result 
is the production of a lot of pseudogynes, or abortive creatures 
structurally intermediate between the workers and queens and 
therefore useless in either capacity. It is instructive to com- 
pare this case with the regeneration of the lens from the iris in the 
Amphibian eye. In his recent analysis of the stimuli of restitu- 
tion in personal organisms Driesch reaches the conclusion that 
“the specificity of what is taken away certainly forms part of the 
JOURNAL OF MORPHOLOGY, VOL. 22, NO. 2 
