THE NATURAL 



practices among them. The sexual co-operation of all 

 the members of a people being useless so far as the con- 

 servation of the race is concerned; and on the other 

 hand inferior species living as neighbours to a superior 

 species being destined to disappear, slavery is good for 

 the inferiors as it assures them perpetuity and a sort of 

 evolution suited to their feebleness. 



A little brown ant, the anergates, having no workers 

 establishes itself as parasite in an ant-hill and gets itself 

 served by workers of another species in order to live. 

 What ingenuity of the sexed, what docility of the sexless! 

 The worker ants are clearly degenerate females, among 

 whom sexual sensibility has been completely trans- 

 formed into maternal sensibility. One observes, more- 

 over, in many species an intermediate type of woman- 

 worker, who gives the key to this evolution. One should 

 note that after fecundation the females do not all re- 

 enter the city; where they fall, they build, as mother- 

 bumble-bees, a provisory nest, acting then like workers, 

 and await the first egg-laying, which will produce ex- 

 clusively real workers and will thereby permit the normal 

 construction of the new ant-hill. 



There are among ants, as among butterflies, hermaph- 

 rodites along the medial line, or sometimes along an 

 oblique line: this gives absurd creatures, half one thing, 

 half the other, or singularities such as a female with a 

 worker's h?ad who functions as a worker. 1 



Polygamy by massacre of males, as among herbivora, 

 and gallinaceae seems a step toward a more logical and 



E. Rambert, after A. Forel, les Moeurs des fourmis (Biblio- 

 theque universelle, tome LV). 



168 



