INSTINCTS OF NEUTER INSECTS. 229 



modifications as genius and experience may have sug- 

 gested. 



Mr. Darwin would probably admit this without hesi- 

 tation; when, therefore, he says that, certain instincts 

 could not possibly have been acquired by habit, he 

 must mean that they could not, under the circumstances, 

 have been remembered by the pupil in the person of 

 the teacher, and that it would be a serious error to sup- 

 pose that the greater number of instincts can be thus 

 remembered. To which I assent readily so far as that 

 it is difficult (though not impossible) to see how some 

 of the most wonderful instincts of neuter ants and bees 

 can be due to the fact that the neuter ant or bee was 

 ever in part, or in some respects, another neuter ant or 

 bee in a previous generation. At the same time I main- 

 tain that this does not militate against the supposition 

 that both instinct and structure are in the main due to 

 memory. For the power of receiving any communi- 

 cation, and acting on it, is due to memory; and the 

 neuter ant or bee may have received its lesson from 

 another neuter ant or bee, who had it from another and 

 modified it ; and so back and back, till the foundation 

 of the habit is reached, and is found to present little 

 more than the faintest family likeness to its more com- 

 plex descendant. Surely Mr. Darwin cannot mean that 

 it can be shewn that the wonderful instincts of neuter 

 ants and bees cannot have been acquired either, as above, 

 by instruction, or by some not immediately obvious form 

 of inherited transmission, but that they must be due to 

 the fact that the ant or bee is, as it were, such and such a 

 machine, of which if you touch such and such a spring, 



