=Certain Characters Inexplicable as Inherited Somatic Acquirements.--=It would require remarkable credulity, in fact, to believe that some of the most striking features about certain plants or animals could have been developed by means of the inheritance of somatic modifications. For example, many animals such as the quail, the rabbit, or the leaf-butterfly are protectively colored. That is, they harmonize in color-pattern with their surroundings so closely that they are overlooked by their enemies. But how can this oversight on the part of an enemy so affect the bodies and through them the germ-cells of such individuals as to develop so high a degree of protective coloration? Or how, indeed, could any of numerous adaptive structures which one can think of, such as the color or scent of flowers to lure insects for cross-pollenation, the various grappling devices on many seeds to secure wide distribution by animals, or the like, have been directly produced by use or disuse or by any variation produced in them by the agents to which they are adapted? =The Case of Neuter Insects.--=A very instructive example of the improbability that great skill, highly specialized structures, or certain instincts are first developed in the parental body as the result of use and then passed on to the offspring, is seen in the case of neuter insects. In bees, for example, there are three classes of individuals: the drones or males; the queens or functional females; and the workers, which are neuter, that is, take no part in reproduction. The latter are really sexually undeveloped females. The queen can lay either fertilized or unfertilized eggs. The latter always give rise to males. The workers gather the food, attend the queen, wait on the young, construct the comb, and in short perform all the ordinary functions of the colony except the reproductive. They have many highly specialized structures on various parts of their bodies for carrying on their many activities, as well as the very highly specialized instincts necessary to the maintenance of the colony. But now, complex and highly developed as these workers are, since they do not give rise to offspring, no matter how much experience or structural modifications they may acquire during their lifetime, it can not be handed on to another generation. Nor can they have come to their present highly organized state through such a form of transmission since they are not the descendants of workers but of a queen. Any new modifications that appear in the workers of a colony must therefore have their origin in changes which have taken place in the germ-cells of the queen, and not in the soma of some other worker. It has been argued that the worker has not always been infertile; that at a more primitive stage of the evolution of the bee colony every female was both worker and mother, and that individual somatic acquirements might therefore have been transmitted, but this argument can not hold for many of the instincts or