92 THE FOUNDATIONS OF ZOOLOGY 



Few things in nature are more wonderful than the perfection 

 of the organization, in the hive, for ensuring the presence of one 

 queen, and for destroying all the others ; but the provision the 

 royal larva makes for its own murder seems to claim a place 

 among these few. 



When a larval bee has completed its growth, and is about to 

 assume the pupa-state, from which it is to emerge as a perfect 

 bee, it spins, like the larvae of many other insects, a protective 

 cocoon of silk, around its body, but, as this is firm enough to 

 offer some resistance to a sting, and as it might even injure the 

 murderess, the royal larva spins an imperfect cocoon, open behind, 

 and covering only the head, thorax, and first abdominal ring. 

 Huber, who discovered this peculiarity, pointed out that the pur- 

 pose of the imperfection is to expose the soft abdomen of the 

 royal larva naked to the mortal sting of the reigning queen. 



The supreme importance of the species, and the relative insig- 

 nificance of the individual, are well illustrated by animals which 

 have dropped their adult structure out of their life history, that the 

 perpetuation of the species may be the more assured. The flying 

 butterfly, with its highly perfected sense-organs, leads an active, 

 independent life, which must, according to any standard, be held 

 higher than the helpless creeping life of the blind caterpillar, yet 

 many species of butterflies and moths have lost this most perfect 

 stage in their life so that they cannot wander away from the 

 plants which are best suited for their larvas, or lay their eggs in 

 any but the best spot. The active, swimming jelly-fish, with its 

 complicated muscular apparatus, its centralized nerve-ring, and its 

 well-developed organs of special sense, is a higher organism than 

 the sessile plant-like hydroid ; yet many hydroids which live in 

 places where swimming adults might be swept out into the open 

 ocean far away from any resting-place for the larvas, have gradually 

 lost the jelly-fish stage, and they now pass their lives and repro- 

 duce their kind, in what was, at one time, their larval or immature 

 condition. From the standpoint of the individual, the degeneration 

 of the jelly-fish into a sexual larva is distinctly a step backwards, 

 marked by disregard of all the best results of a long history of 

 gradual progress and improvement. It is a sacrifice of all that is 

 "best" in the life of the individual for the good of the species. 



