confined to the workers individually, for these, being infertile, could not transmit any of their inherent qualities or tendencies to variation in the direction of more efficient workers. On the contrary, all that they possess they inherit from the queen-mother, who transmits to her offspring the qualities and characteristics her forebears in the female line possessed in their own person. CHAPTER XIV PARTHENOGENESIS AND ITS SEQUEL Courtship among the Ants—The Great Renunciation—Maternity carried to Extremes—Where Males are Superfluous—Degenerate Males—Keeping Death at Bay—Where Females are Unknown. The phenomenon of virgin birth is one of profound mystery. The existence of so astonishing a mode of reproduction was an established belief among the ancients, though they could have had no means of demonstrating the faith that was in them. But these men saw no difficulty in ascribing to the females of their own race this faculty of producing offspring without the intervention of a male. One suspects, indeed, that there was no solid foundation whatever for this belief in these miraculous powers: they lived in credulous times, and the recorded occurrences of these, even to them, irregular births are to be regarded as devised to afford a convenient means of escape from the consequences of lapses from the path of virtue. Yet, incredible as it may appear, there are not wanting to-day both men and women who affect to believe that this mode of reproduction obtains still among the human race, in certain exceptional cases; and further, they profess a conviction that in the future it may become the normal mode, males, in consequence, becoming unnecessary! Such professions of faith are made only by the ignorant, or by those who trade on human credulity. Parthenogenesis not only does not occur in the human race, but it does not even occur in any member of the great group of vertebrates of which man himself stands at the head, and it never will occur.