1906.] Wheeler, Founding of Colonics by Queen Ants. 99 



Wasmann, who has for years been studying the typical sanguinea 

 in a region where it seems to be very abundant, has concentrated his 

 attention on the dulotic instincts of the workers. To discuss the views 

 he has advanced on this subject is unnecessary, because I beheve 

 that they are the result of seeking answers to questions that should 

 have been propounded in a different way. The same is true of much 

 of the general discussion which some years ago culminated in a well- 

 known controversy between Weismann and Herbert Spencer on the 

 all-sufhciency of natural selection. All along it has been tacitly as- 

 sumed that the workers have peculiar instincts of their own, differing 

 qualitatively from those of the queens of the corresponding species ; and 

 since the workers are normally infertile, there was great difficulty in ac- 

 counting for the adaptive structures and behavior inherited through 

 an organism that did not exercise nor even manifest them. The first 

 question should really be: Does the worker have any physical or 

 psychical characters that are not somehow represented in the female ? 

 In other words, are not the worker characters adaptively correlated 

 excess or defect, that is, merely quantitative characters of the queen, 

 characters differing from those of the queen after the manner of 

 fluctuating variations and not of mutations? Had such questions 

 been asked at the outset, a painstaking and comprehensive study of 

 the female ant would probably have been inaugurated. And had this 

 been done, I feel sure that much less would have been written about 

 the differences in intelligence, instincts, etc. between workers and 

 queens. The idea that the fertile female contains all the potentialities 

 of the species would have been familiar. It would have been seen 

 that in the workers characters such as structures, instincts, phy- 

 siological reactions as expressed by longevity, resistance to maxima 

 and minima of temperature, moisture, poisons, etc., are commonly less 

 developed than in the queens. Some characters, however, are more 

 strongly developed in the workers. It is true, for example, that some 

 of the worker instincts, such as the foraging instincts, are supposed 

 to be absent in the queens, but I have seen old, dealated females of 

 Trachymyrmex septenirionalis not only in the act of excavating the 

 nest in company with the workers, but actually collecting and carrying 

 in caterpillar excrement on which to grow the fungus garden. Emery 

 and Forel long ago observed Polycrgus females accompanying the 

 dulotic expeditions of the workers. It is also well known that young 



from his own statement and that of the editor. I still maintain that observations on mixed 

 colonies comparable to those of F. consocians were far too meagre, prior to the appearance of my 

 paper to justify Wasmann's claim of independent discovery. It certainly does not nelp his 

 case to write at length about all kinds of adojjtion among ants when there was onlv one kind under 

 discussion. 



