1941] 
Antiquity of Social Insects 
105 
CONCERNING THE ANTIQUITY OF SOCIAL INSECTS 
By Roland W. Brown 
U. S. Geological Survey, Washington, D. C. 
In the March 1941 number of this journal J. C. Bequaert 
and F. M. Carpenter 1 published a six-page discussion of the 
antiquity of social insects. Two thirds of this space was 
given to a formulation of criticisms purporting to cast doubt 
on my identification of an object from Upper Cretaceous 
strata in southwestern Utah as the comb of a wasp nest 
called Celliforma favosites. 2 As most of these criticisms 
do not appear to be well founded a rejoinder is necessary to 
clarify the issue. 
A small matter of terminology first needs attention. In 
footnote 2 Bequaert and Carpenter object to my use of the 
term mold for the fossil and say that they consider cast more 
appropriate. The popular conception of a cast is that of a 
casting , which is anything that has been poured into and, 
after hardening, has been removed from a mold. Casting 
in this sense is a general term. Paleontologists, sculptors, 
and others, however, use the term cast in a specific sense, 
namely, as a duplicate or positive of the original object; 
and mold as the reverse or negative of that object. Conse- 
quently, as the fossil I have described is merely the filling 
of the cells, it is not a duplicate of the original paper nest 
itself and is therefore not a cast but a mold. 
It should be noted particularly, before considering their 
arguments in detail, that Bequaert and Carpenter do not 
deny that the object in question is a fossil, although I myself 
had qualms on this point and withheld publication for four 
years, because I sought evidence from mineralogy to account 
for the origin of the specimen by inorganic means alone. Re- 
iBequaert, J. C., and Carpenter, F. M. The antiquity of social 
insects. Psyche, vol. 48, pp. 50-55, 1941. 
2 Brown, Roland W. The comb of a wasp nest from the Upper 
Cretaceous of Utah. Am. Jour. Sci., vol. 239, pp. 54-56, 1941. 
