Page - 292 - in The Origin of Species

292 ORIGIN OF SPECIES with the longest horns; and yet no one ox would ever have propagated its kind. Here is a better and real illustration : according to M. Verlot, some varieties of the double annual Stock from having been long and carefully selected to the right degree, always produce a large proportion of seedlings bearing double and quite sterile flowers ; but they likewise yield some single and fertile plants. These latter, by which alone the variety can be propagated, may be compared with the fertile male and female ants, and the double sterile plants with the neuters of the same community. As with the varie- ties of the stock, so with social insects, selection has been applied to the family, and not to the individual, for the sake of gaining a serviceable end. Hence we may conclude that slight modifications of structure or of instinct, correlated with the sterile condition of certain members of the com- munity, have proved advantageous : consequently the fertile males and females have flourished, and transmitted to their fertile offspring a tendency to produce sterile members with the same modifications. This process must have been re- peated many times, until that prodigious amount of difference between the fertile and sterile females of the same species has been produced, which we see in many social insects. But we have not as yet touched on the acme of the diffi- culty ; namely, the fact that the neuters of several ants differ, not only from the fertile females and males, but from each other, sometimes to an almost incredible degree, and are thus divided into two or even three castes. The castes, moreover, do not commonly graduate into each other, but are perfectly well defined ; being as distinct from each other as are any two species of the same genus, or rather as any two genera of the same family. Thus in Eciton, there are working and soldier neuters, with jaws and instincts extraordinarily different: in Cryptocerus, the workers of one caste alone carry a wonder- ful sort of shield on their heads, the use of which is quite unknown: in the Mexican Myrmecocystus, the workers of one caste never leave the nest; they are fed by the workers of another caste, and they have an enormously developed ab- domenwhich secretes a sort of honey, supplying the place of that excreted by the aphides, or the domestic cattle as they may be called, which our European ants guard and imprison.