ITS METHODS AND TENDENCIES. 465 
loss of this power in the great majority of the individuals 
which compose it. This objection will perhaps be met by 
the Darwinians with the assertion that the community, in 
fact, constitutes an individual; but I must confess that I 
find it difficult to comprehend how the sterility of the 
workers in ants and bees was ever introduced through the 
medium of modified descent, the Darwinian method, or 
how it is kept up from generation to generation among 
those individuals who have no posterity to inherit their 
peculiarities of structure. 
The Honey Ants of Mexico offer additional difficulties. 
Among them a portion of the community secrete honey in 
the abdominal cavity until they resemble small grapes, 
and these individuals, during the winter, are dispatched 
in succession to furnish food for the other members of the 
colony. How, by modified descent, is this honey-making 
faculty transmitted, when those who possess it are sys- 
tematically destroyed ? 
A still harder nut for the Darwinians to crack is fur- 
nished in a fact stated by Dr. Stimpson, that among the 
crustacea, which do not live in communities, a very large 
proportion of the individuals of a numerically powerful spe- 
cies pass their lives as neuters, or undeveloped females. 
Another element in nature’s economy, which at first 
sight suggests an objection to the Darwinian theory, is 
that of beauty, which affects others far more than the pos- 
sessor. This is considered by the Darwinians simply as 
an attraction to the opposite sex, but as a fact we find 
that in the larval condition of some insects—a condition 
in which no propagation is effected—varieties of form 
and combinations of color exist which appeal to our sense 
of beauty scarcely less forcibly than in the perfect insects. 
Again, the origin of life is left completely untouched 
AMERICAN NAT., VOL. I. 59 
