Darwin's Artificial and Natural Selection 127 
are to save time: for instance, their habit, of cutting holes 
and sucking the nectar at the bases of certain flowers, which 
with a very little more trouble, they can enter by the mouth. 
Bearing such facts in mind, it may be believed that under 
certain circumstances individual differences in the curvature 
or length of the proboscis, etc., too slight to be appreciated 
by us, might profit a bee or other insect, so that certain indi- 
viduals would be able to obtain their food more quickly than 
others; and thus the communities to which they belonged 
would flourish and throw off many swarms inheriting the 
same peculiarities.” 
Aside from the general criticism that will suggest itself 
here also, it should be pointed out that even if “ certain indi- 
viduals”” of the bees had slightly longer proboscides, this 
would, in the case of the hive-bees at least, be of no avail, 
since they do not reproduce, and hence leave no descendants 
with longer mouth-parts. Of course, it may be replied that 
those colonies in which the queens produce more of the long- 
proboscis kind of worker would have an advantage over other 
colonies not having so many individuals of this sort. It 
would then be a competition of one colony with another, as 
Darwin supposes to take place in colonial forms. But whether 
slight differences of this sort would lead to the elimination 
of the least well-endowed colonies is entirely a matter of 
speculation. Since there are flowers with corolla-tubes of 
all lengths, we can readily suppose that if one kind of flower 
excluded individuals of certain colonies, they would search 
elsewhere for their nectar rather than perish. While differ- 
ent races might arise in this way, the process would not be 
the survival of the fittest, but a process of adaptation to a new 
environment. 
We come now to a topic on which Darwin lays much 
stress: the divergence of character. He tries to show how 
the “lesser differences between the varieties become aug- 
mented into the greater differences between species.” 
