INSTINCTS OF NEUTER INSECTS. 223 



liking to do this or that when he is grown up, simply 

 from recollection of what he did last time, and of what 

 on the whole suited him. 



For it must be remembered that a drug which should 

 destroy some one part at an early embryonic stage, and 

 thus prevent it from development, would prevent the 

 creature from recognising the surroundings which 

 affected that part when he was last alive and unmuti- 

 lated, as being the same as his present surroundings. 

 He would be puzzled, for he would be viewing the posi- 

 tion from a different standpoint. If any important 

 item in a number of associated ideas disappears, the 

 plot fails; and a great internal change is an exceedingly 

 important item. Life and things to a creature so treated . 

 at an early embryonic stage would not be life and things 

 as he last remembered them ; hence he would not be 

 able to do the same now as he did then ; that is to say, 

 he would vary both in structure and instinct; but if 

 the creature were tolerably uniform to start with, and 

 were treated in a tolerably uniform way, we might 

 expect the effect produced to be much the same in all 

 ordinary cases. 



We see, also, that any important change in treatment / 

 and surroundings, if not sufficient to kill, would and 

 does tend to produce not only variability but sterility, 

 as part of the same story and for the same reason — 

 namely, default of memory; this default will be of 

 every degree of intensity, from total failure, to a slight 

 disturbance of memory as affecting some one particular 

 organ only; that is to say, from total sterility, to a 

 slight variation in an unimportant part. So that even 



