6 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 76 



of the Tcrmes group in the Tropics, in special beds or gardens 

 (pi. I, figs. 1-8). Termite diet is further varied by an occasional 

 lapse from the normal pure vegetable food by a meal on a wounded, 

 sickly or dead member of the colony, leading to eugenics, as pointed 

 out by Wheeler. In assisting termites to shed their skins, the insect 

 in the quiescent stage during molting is sometimes eaten by workers 

 instead of merely the shed skin ; probably this only occurs in the case 

 of deformed individuals. 



The chief diet of termites was always mainly cellulose from pre- 

 social to the present times. In all termites except the higher forms, 

 protozoa occur in the guts, and act as enzymes in aiding termites 

 to digest the cellulose when in the form of wood; in mature queens 

 the jaw muscles have degenerated, due to the fact that they are 

 fed on partly digested food, and no longer masticate wood. It is 

 among the higher termites that specialized foods play a more impor- 

 tant role, and here the special wood-digesting protozoa are absent. 



Having progressed thus far, restraining myself from using the 

 much abused term " anthropocentrism," may I be permitted to state 

 that, while termites have brains, and no one can deny but that 

 there is undoubtedly a spirit of the colony or solicitude for the com- 

 munal welfare, termites cannot be endowed with human reason. 

 Thompson's work on the brains of termites has shown that the young 

 are dififerentiated at the time of hatching and has proven that worker 

 termites do not determine any caste by feeding. Furthermore, many 

 of their instincts of care of the brood, etc., have purely selfish bases. 

 I refer to worker termites! What can be said of the workers of the 

 honey bee? Has their social specialization — or possibly domestica- 

 tion — enabled the honey bee (unlike the ants and termites) to make 

 a study of dietetics so intensive as to place the control of the caste of 

 the organisms to come in the hands of the feeding workers? I 

 realize that careful work has been done by competent entomologists 

 throughout the world on the honey bee. Nevertheless may I not 

 make an earnest plea for an open-minded study, combining careful 

 cytological work with experimentation with living colonies, to defi- 

 nitely settle whether or not the difference between the worker and 

 queen of Apis melliUca Linn, is blastogenic? Whether an impreg- 

 nated Qgg or a three-day-old worker can be developed into a queen 

 by being fed upon the highly nutritious " royal pabulum," or being 

 left in a smaller cell and fed meagerly, develop into a worker — the 

 ultimate fate being subject, as Lull states, to the whim of the workers ! 



