XII INSTINCT AND REASON 345 
Origin of Instincts. 
It is natural to think of instincts as habits that 
have been handed down from generation to generation 
till at last they have become petrified. It is impos- 
sible, in spite of the dearth of direct evidence, to deny 
that acquired habits may be transmitted, but it is 
not difficult to show that instincts sometimes have 
a quite different origin. In a beehive it is the worker 
bees alone that make the hexagonal cells, shaping them 
with almost mathematical exactness, and fitting them 
together in a way that involves the least possible 
expenditure of wax. These workers are undeveloped 
females and leave no descendants, the eggs from 
which the young bees are born being all laid by the 
quecn bee, whose sole duty is to lay eggs and who 
never helps in the work of cell-building. Any habit, 
then, that is formed by the workers cannot possibly be 
handed down to the next generation. We must, 
therefore, look elsewhere for the origin of the instincts 
of the hive bee. The explanation which Darwin 
gave was the very simple one that communities of 
bees which had these three classes, the drones or males, 
the queens, and the neuter females or workers, throve 
greatly and multiplied rapidly, whereas in hives in 
which all the females were both egg-layers and 
workers, the population gradually dwindled, so that at 
last the race became extinct. This idea might seem 
far-fetched had not gardeners produced a similar 
result with stocks. These flowers are generally 
double and produce no seed, but among them there is 
