326 KELLOGG AND BELL 



among several thousand individuals, gathered together to hiber- 

 nate after an active life, having been exposed to the attacks of 

 bird and insect enemies, to the rigors of climatic conditions and to 

 the necessities of obtaining food (other smaller insects, as aphids, 

 etc., caught alive), such a range of variation in pattern is found 

 as enables us to describe (so that they may be actually readily 

 distinguished by verbal description), eighty-four "aberrations" 

 or pattern-variates : lady-birds with no spots, with one, with two, 

 with three, with each of all the numbers up to and including 

 eighteen distinct small black spots, the different numbers usually 

 being represented by several different combinations of spots. 

 Systematic entomologists describe Hippodamia convergens as a 

 brown-red beetle with six black spots on each elytron and this 

 description is true for most beetles of this species. But not at 

 all for all ; nor even approximately for many. After a season 

 of exposure to the struggle for existence, to the rigors of selec- 

 tion, individuals with one spot, with six spots, with twelve spots, 

 with eighteen, find themselves alive and healthy ; they come 

 together to pass a quiet winter under the fallen oak leaves on a 

 mountain side ready to mate miscellaneously in the spring and 

 produce young of all manner of pattern (as far as number and 

 arrangement of spots go) which young, whether twelve-spotted 

 as they ought to be, or no-spotted, or eighteen-spotted as they 

 may be, will apparently go safely through life despite the mal- 

 evolent search of the all-powerful bug-a-boo, Rigor of Selection ! 

 Directly touching the point, too, are our data of the variation 

 of series of honey-bees collected from free-flying individuals 

 after exposure as adults to the rigors of out-door life, as com- 

 pared with the variation in the series of bees, adult, but col- 

 lected just as issuing from the cells before being exposed as 

 adults in any way to the external dangers of living. Series of 

 both drones and workers representing both exposed and unex- 

 dosed individuals were studied. The results of this examination 

 are, put in one statement, that the variation among the exposed 

 individuals is no less than that among the unexposed individ- 

 uals. This means that these various mostly slight blastogenic 

 variations (although in such important organs as the wings) 

 which occur among bees at the time of their issuance as active, 



