Characters, Hereditary and Acquired. 93 



suppose that the instincts of all the different castes of 

 neuters are latent in the queen and drones, together 

 with the other instincts which are patent in both. 

 Lastly, it seems necessary to suppose that all thi^ 

 wonderful organization of complex and segregated 

 instincts must have been built up by natural selection 

 acting exclusively on the queens and drones — seeing 

 that these exercise their own instincts only once in 

 a life-time, while, as just observed, the neuters cannot 

 possibly bequeath their individual experience to 

 progeny. Obviously, however, natural selection must 

 here be supposed to be operating at an immense 

 disadvantage ; for it must have built up the often 

 diverse and always complex instincts of neuters, not 

 directly, but indirectly through the queens and drones, 

 which never manifest any of these instincts themselves. 

 Now Darwin fully acknowledged the difficulty of 

 attributing these results to the unaided influence of 

 natural selection ; but the fact of neuter insects being 

 unable to propagate seemed to him to leave no 

 alternative. And so it seems to Weismann, who 

 accordingly quotes these instincts in support of his 

 views. And so it seemed to me, until my work- 

 on Animal Intelligence was translated into French, 

 and an able Preface was supplied to that translation 

 by M. Perrier. In this Preface it is argued that we 

 are not necessarily obliged to exclude the possibility 

 of Lamarckian piinciples having operated in the 

 original formation of these instincts. On the contrary, 

 if such principles ever operate at all, Perrier shows 

 that here we have a case where it is virtually certain 

 that they must have operated. For although neuter 

 insects are now unable to propagate, their organiza- 



