684 



APPENDIX B. 



formed, the formation of those prompting and regulating the 

 regurgitation of the food into the mouths of larvae are arrested. 

 What will be the consequence ? The life of the worker is mainly 

 passed in taking in food and putting it out again. If the putting 

 out is stopped its life will be mainly passed in taking in food. 

 The receptacle will go on enlarging and it will eventually assume 

 the monstrous form that we see.* 



Here, however, to exclude misinterpretations, let me explain. 

 I by no means deny that variation and selection have produced, 

 in these insect-communities, certain effects such as Mr. Darwin 

 suggested. Doubtless ant-queens vary ; doubtless there are varia- 

 tions in their eggs ; doubtless differences of structure in the re- 

 sulting progeny sometimes prove advantageous to the stirp, and 

 originate slight modifications of the species. But such changes, 

 legitimately to be assumed, are changes in single parts — in single 

 organs or portions of organs. Admission of this does not in- 

 volve admission that there can take place numerous correlated 

 variations in different and often remote parts, which must take 

 place simultaneously or else be useless. Assumption of this is 

 what Professor Weismann's argument requires, and assumption 

 of this we have seen to be absurd. 



Before leaving the general problem presented by the social 

 insects, let me remark that the various complexities of action 

 not explained by inheritance from pre-social or semi-social types, 

 are probably due to accumulated and transmitted knowledge. I 

 recently read an account of the education of a butterfly, carried 

 to the extent that it became quite friendly with its protector 

 and would come to be fed. If a non-social and relatively unin- 

 telligent insect is capable of thus far consciously adjusting its 

 actions, then it seems a reasonable supposition that in a com- 

 munity of social insects there has arisen a mass of experience and 

 usage into which each new individual is initiated ; just as happens 

 among ourselves. We have only to consider the chaos which 

 would result were we suddenly bereft of language, and if the 

 young were left to grow up without precept and example, to see 

 that very probably the polity of an insect community is made 

 possible by the addition of intelligence to instinct, and the trans- 

 mission of information through sign-language. 



There remains now the question of panmixia^ which stands 

 exactly where it did when I published the " Rejoinder to Pro- 

 fessor Weismann." 



* This interpretation harmonizes with a fact which I learn from Prof. 

 Riley, that there are gradations in this development, and that in some species 

 the ordinary neuters swell their abdomens so greatly with food that they can 

 hardly get home. 



