CONSTITUTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF TERMITES. 33 



queens are very far from attaining the colossal dimensions so 

 well known in exotic species, suggest that our European species 

 may be iu process of degeneration. 



Such a belief would rest on the behaviour of the royal forms 

 iu the Termes society; but is this foundation really valid ? 

 At first sight Termes lucifugus certainly appears to be 

 very different from the species hitherto described, but an exa- 

 mination of the many brief and incomplete accounts we 

 possess allows me to assert that all the Termitidae of other coun- 

 tries really fall into the two primary types I have observed in 

 Calotermes and Termes. These are — 



(1) A colony presided over by a king and queen, 

 which have possessed and shed fully developed wings. 

 When orphaned it is headed by a pair of royal sub- 

 stitute or neoteinic forms. 



(2) A colony at the head of which are numerous 

 neoteinic queens, the kings, also neoteinic, being 

 present for short periods only. The colony is not 

 founded by the royal forms which govern it; or, more 

 exactly, the neoteinic forms have been raised by a 

 detached portion of a pre-existing colony, which thus 

 founds a new and independent society. 



Hagen discovered, but could attach no meaning to, a certain 

 number of examples in other species, e.g. Termes morio, 

 Latr., which must be interpreted as neoteinic royal forms.^ 

 Fritz Miiller states ^ that Hagen wrote to him that the Asiatic 

 and African queens are all true imagos with wing-stnmps, 

 but that all those from Brazil and America generally are in 

 the nymph garb ; but this is contradicted by Miiller, who found 

 hundreds of true queens in Brazil, as well as those in nymph 

 form. 



1 am myself acquainted with nymph-like forms of several 

 tropical species ; I therefore conclude that all Termitidte are 

 reducible to the two main types above mentioned, and see no 



' [A better example of a neoteinic form is given by Hagen in Termes 

 debilis, Hear, ' Linn. Ent.,' xii, p. 207, pi. i, fig. 26.] 



2 ['Jen. Zeitschr.,' 1873, p. 457, note 3.] 



VOL. 40, PAET 1. NEW SEE. C 



