320 WILLIAM MORTON WHEELER 
stimulus we are searching for, and it does so by being communi- 
cated in some way by something that has relations to many, if 
not all, parts of the organism and not only to the neighboring 
ones.”’ He also says that “‘each part of the organism assigns its 
specific share to an unknown something and that this something 
is altered as soon as a part is removed or absolutely stopped in 
its functional life, and that the specific alteration of the something 
is our stimulus of restitutions.’”’ These quotations and Driesch’s 
further discussion of the problem are even clearer in their applica- 
tion to the colonial than to the personal organism, for in the 
former it is much easier to see how each individual insect “can 
do more than one thing in the service of restitution” than it is 
to understand how each cell of the person can do more than one 
thing in restoring a lost organ. 
I fear that I may have wearied you with this long attempt to 
prove that the ant-colony is a true organism, especially as this 
statement must seem to some of you to be too trite for discussion, 
but when an author like Driesch writesa large workin two volumes 
on the ‘‘Philosophy of the Organism’ and ignores the colonial 
organisms altogether, an old-fashioned zoologist may perhaps be 
pardoned for calling attention to a well-founded, though some- 
what thread-bare, biological conception. 
If it be granted that the ant-colony and those of the other social 
insects are organisms, we are still confronted with the formidable 
question as to what regulates the anticipatory co6peration, or 
synergy of the colonial personnel and determines its unitary and 
individualized course. The resemblance of the ant- or bee-colony 
to the human state long ago suggested a naive reply to this ques- 
tion. Aristotle naturally supposed the colonial activities to be 
directed and regulated by a Baovdtels or jyeuwv, because these 
personages managed affairs in the Greek states. After the sex 
of the fertile individual had been discovered by Swammerdam, 
the word ‘queen’ was naturally substituted for Bacvdebs or ‘king,’ 
and as queens in human states do not necessarily govern and are 
often rather anabolic, sedentary and prolific persons and the 
objects of much flattering attention, the term is not altogether 
inapt when applied to the fertile females of insect colonies. It 
