208 THE THEORIES OF EVOLUTION 



from their dormant state and which provokes the de- 

 velopment of rudimentary ovaries and of all the other 

 secondary sexual characters which distinguish the 

 workers from the queen. 



We hardly need to point out how arbitrary Weis- 

 mann's hypotheses become ( for instance his statement 

 that insufficient nutrition acts as a stimulus for the 

 determinants of barren ovaries) when he endeavours 

 to make his theory fit the real facts. 



Sexual dimorphism in ants and bees and the charac- 

 ters of the workers constituted one of the capital points 

 in the controversy between Weismann and Spencer. 

 Weismann contended that the degeneration of the 

 ovary and the various characters depending upon it 

 could not result from disuse, since the workers do not 

 breed and therefore cannot transmit those characters 

 to any offspring. Spencer answered that the workers 

 were only females with arrested development. This 

 is proved by the fact that the bee or ant communities 

 can in an emergency breed queens by overfeeding 

 larvae, which under ordinary conditions would have 

 developed into workers. The gradual growth of so- 

 cial life among insects leads one to suppose that all 

 their other characters and also their instincts were 

 acquired before those insects became specialised, when 

 they lived an isolated life or belonged to homogeneous 

 communities. 



Many other cases were brought forth in the course 



