SOCIAL MATERNITY. 95 



After instances like these, who can do otherwise than admit, 

 with the amiable and enlightened Sharon Turner, that "in 

 some insects the mother animal has those sensibilities of re- 

 gard, care, anxiety, attention, watching, and protective guar- 

 dianship, and that desire to feed and foster the young race 

 which is to succeed the parental one, which the male has not 

 been intended to possess and does not exhibit." The same 

 author declares, that he considers " the mother as complete in 

 the ant as in the whale.' ' 



Now with reference to ants, as well as social bees and social 

 wasps, we must here notice, that though in them the maternal 

 instincts and affections are developed, perhaps, even more 

 powerfully than in any other insect tribes, it is with this 

 remarkable difference, that, instead of being implanted chiefly 

 in the parent herself, and that generally for a short period, 

 they reign paramount, through life, in the working population 

 of the ant-hill and the hive, with which, in fact, love of their 

 young forms the very mainspring of activity. 



But even here as if this tender affection were always de- 

 signed to be the distinctive characteristic of the female sex 

 we find that the " workers," on whom (though no mothers) de- 

 volve all the cares which usually belong to maternity, are none 

 other than females, though of structure imperfectly developed. 



We have particularly noticed in another place the curious 

 practice of the mother ant in self-divesting herself (as a matron 

 throwing off the gayer garb and habits of her maidenhood) of 



