ORGANIC RESPONSE 259 



species, however, is due to the color of the food plant. 

 The egg of the honey bee develops either into a queen 

 or into a worker according to the nature and quantity 

 of the food that is supplied the larva by the attending 

 bees. 



General Adaptation. - - To the man who stops to 

 look below the surface of things one of the most 

 wonderful aspects of nature is the apparently perfect 

 way in which all living organisms are suited to the 

 particular sort of environment in which they are 

 found. As soon as one realizes that the environment 

 is not a permanent, changeless sort of a thing, but is 

 as plastic and impermanent as the organisms them- 

 selves, the marvel grows that so many forms of life 

 should be or should have become adapted to a 

 particular sort of environment at a given time. 

 And the more thought that is given the matter, the 

 more it is realized that this adjustment is one of the 

 fundamental problems of biology. We have seen 

 that the individual, as a rule, responds very quickly 

 to any alteration of environmental conditions, but 

 experiment also shows conclusively that the response 

 is only individual and that the abstraction we call 

 race, or species, is unaffected thereby. How, then, 

 does it come about that the species is so admirably 

 adapted ? Two answers have been offered to this 

 problem, the Darwinian and the Lamarckian, and 

 this theoretical aspect of the phenomena we shall 

 consider in the next chapter, contenting ourselves 

 for the present with reviewing some of the more 



