268 MENTAL FACULTIES SEC. 



ties by exercise; we have to deal rather with two sets 

 of connected characters which develop into perfection without 

 any need of further practice, according as the larva receives 

 the extra food or not. These two groups of characters unite 

 together to form a whole, just as from a number of pieces of 

 glass in a kaleidoscope two symmetrical pictures appear, 

 according to the way it is shaken. In consequence of the 

 better nourishment, a different development of the brain takes 

 place paripassu with the development of the other characters, 

 so that a perfectly definite set of mental characters becomes 

 simultaneously predominant. 



As I have said in my Freiburg address, we must regard 

 the different forms of bees, queen, drones, workers, as discon- 

 tinuous organs of one whole, which have been evolved from 

 a single indifferent ancestral form. And this differentiation 

 can only be the result, not merely of external demands, but 

 also of direct external influences especially of experiences. 



Only thus can we explain to ourselves the fact that the 

 peculiarities of the workers, notwithstanding that they do not 

 reproduce, are inherited they are inherited not indeed 

 through the workers themselves, but from the ancestors. The 

 sexual union of drone and queen produces a germ which 

 possesses all the characters which the original bee must have 

 possessed at the time when as yet no separation into queen 

 and drones and workers had occurred. 



From the fertilised egg can proceed a worker, or with 

 better nourishment, a queen, also a drone, but the latter not 

 directly but still indirectly ; the queen " buds," she lays eggs, 

 and if these are not fertilised, drones are produced from them. 

 We have, however, compared fertilisation with conjugation, 

 and represented it as a kind of nutrition : if, then, the egg of 

 the queen is from the first better nourished by the spermato- 

 zoon, it gives rise to a female or a worker larva. 



The two sexes of plants and animals, according to the pre- 



