1898-99. | Queensland Termites. Il 
developed males or females; they do not lay eggs. It may 
be remembered that Darwin said that it needed great con- 
fidence in his theory not to renounce it in face of the facts 
that workers and soldiers are quite different from their parents, 
and that they exist without reproducing themselves. 
2. Grassi believes that the difference between the castes, 
like that between worker and queen bees, is brought about by 
feeding. Termites eat up every kind of refuse matter in the 
nest—dead bodies, as pointed out by Mr Grieve, and cast-off 
skins;,while a favourite food is their own excrement. A 
soldier cannot gnaw dead wood like a worker on account of 
the size of its mandibles, and its food is chiefly its dead or 
ailing fellows. Termites of other species are not eaten. 
3. Like queen bees, royal pairs (at least queens) live much 
longer than workers or soldiers. 
4. Termites keep a number of complementary queens and 
kings, which are immature but can take the place of the true 
royalties, and be stimulated to reproduction should accident or 
occasion require it. When these reserve royalties are too 
numerous they are killed and eaten. Curiously, the nests of 
Termes lucifugus in Sicily have all, or nearly all, substitution 
royalties: the communities have outlived the life of the true 
royalties. 
5. Reproduction is limited to a single pair or to very few 
pairs in a single nest. This is true of all social insects. 
6. Bees in their social arrangements resemble termites 
much. Bees are a more intelligent community. The two 
communities have had quite different origins, and yet in their 
social systems they are strikingly like. To widen the idea, 
resembling forms (say allied species) may have had quite 
different origins. 
7. Termites have a slow development individually, bees a 
rapid. Termites pass through hardly any metamorphosis; bees 
have a complete metamorphosis. Metamorphosis enables an 
insect to attain a much higher development in a shorter time. 
These propositions are well worthy of the consideration of 
all Field Naturalists. | 
