PARTHENOGENESIS AND ITS SEQUEL 299 



directions to provide accommodation for the vast popu- 

 lation that is soon to crowd the thoroughfares. Mean- 

 while the queen resumes her task of producing more and 

 yet more daughters, in whom she now displays not the 

 slightest interest. Her elder children now bear away 

 the eggs, and feed the young as they hatch. In course 

 of time, as with the Bees, the task of wet-nurse falls on 

 the youngest of the Ants, those who have just attained 

 to anthood. For ten or fifteen years this queen-mother 

 may continue her work of reproduction, a slave, indeed, 

 to domesticity, with monotonous regularity, checked 

 only by the chill of autumn and the sleep of winter. 



Those among our own race who profess to hail the 

 prospect of a time when parthenogenesis shall be the 

 normal mode of reproduction may well take the Ant 

 as an awful warning. Their ambitions may overreach 

 the mark. The poor queen becomes a slave to repro- 

 duction ; children in myriads are born to her ; even if 

 she would she could not sustain her interest in them, she 

 could not even recognize them as the fruit of her body. 

 Her daughters are born to a lifelong drudgery, her sons 

 are mere fertilizing agents ; for their only purpose in life 

 is to perpetuate this awful thraldom, this appalHng 

 prolificness ; and having accomplished this, they die 

 forthwith. If there be any joy in this life it is drunk 

 by the males alone. Thus does the female rule over- 

 reach itself. It is well, indeed, that the participants of 

 the joyous nuptial flights dancing deliriously on gauzy 

 wings in the glare of a summer day, have no foreknow- 

 ledge of the long night that is to follow. 



Unlike the Bees, the Ants may produce as many as 

 five grades of workers, each of which have different 

 duties towards the community. But the nature of those 



