172 INTERNAL ANATOMY OF INSECTS. 



to you what the modern doctrine of physiologists is with 

 respect to certain individuals, usually forming the most 

 numerous part of the community with insects living in 

 society, that were formerly supposed to be neuters, or as 

 to their sex neither male nor female that they are in 

 almost every instance a kind of abortive females, fed with 

 a different and less stimulating food than that appropri- 

 ated to those whose ovaries are to be developed, and in 

 consequence in most instances incapable of conception a . 

 Upon these sterile females, you also heard, devolve in 

 general the principal labours of their respective colonies, 

 showing the beneficent design of PROVIDENCE in exempt- 

 ing them from sexual cares and desires, and meriting for 

 them the more appropriate name, now generally used, of 

 ^workers. The differences in the structure of the female 

 bee and the workers were also then accounted for ; and 

 similar reasoning may be had recourse to with regard to 

 those of ants, in which the worker and the female differ 

 still more materially. My reason for introducing this 

 subject here, is to observe to you that I have some 

 grounds for thinking that this system extends further 

 than is usually supposed, and that to each species in 

 some Coleopterous and other genera there are certain 

 individuals intermediate between the male and female ; 

 this I seem to have observed more especially in Copris 

 and Onthophagus, For in almost every British species 

 in my cabinet of these genera I possess such an indivi- 

 dual, distinguished particularly by having a horn on the 

 head longer than that of the female, but much shorter 



a VOL. II. p. 50, 110, 118, 125, 130. The neuters of 

 the Termites, however, (p. 33.) seem to be a distinct sex, if I may 

 so speak and to merit that name. 



