LAMARCK 95 



which are exposed to these conditions have children. If sterile 

 organisms, which have no descendants, are ever gradually adapted 

 to the conditions of their life, the mechanical effect of these con- 

 ditions can have no part, direct or indirect, incipient or otherwise, 

 in the production of the adjustment. As the sterile workers of 

 allied species of social insects differ from each other in habits, in 

 instincts, and in anatomical structure, more than the males and 

 the fertile females, this diversity among the workers must have 

 become established after the workers themselves had become 

 sterile. 



Whole books have been written on the marvellous fitness of 

 the structure, the instincts, and the habits of the worker of the 

 honey-bee for its life of active industry, a life in which the male 

 has no share, and from which the female is cut off by her seclu- 

 sion in the depths of the hive, and by her devotion to her own 

 peculiar duties. While the queen and the drones are well fitted 

 for their own parts in the social organization of the hive, these 

 duties are quite simple, and very different from the duties of the 

 workers ; and as these latter do not normally have descendants, 

 and as they never, under any circumstances, have female descen- 

 dants, all the workers are the descendants of queens and not of 

 workers. 



Their wonderful and admirable fitness for their own most neces- 

 sary part in the economy of the hive must, therefore, be inherited 

 from parents who have never been exposed to those conditions to 

 which the workers are adapted ; and this adaptation cannot be 

 due to the inheritance of the effect of these conditions ; nor can 

 we believe that they are inherited from some remote time, when 

 the workers were perfect females, or when the queens were also 

 workers; for the sterile workers of allied species differ among 

 themselves, thus proving that they have undergone modification 

 since they became sterile. 



Here we have a most complicated and perfect adjustment, of 

 marvellous efficacy, to external conditions which are of such a 

 character as to prove that the inheritance of the effect of these 

 conditions has had no part in the production of the adaptation. 



This is not a solitary case, but a familiar illustration of a 

 general law ; for a little thought will show that most of the 



