To explain such a riot of reproduction one might almost suppose these insects to be imbued with a dread of the impending dissolution of their race, and endowed with the power to avert such a calamity by these stupendous efforts; for it is evident that parthenogenesis confers quite extraordinary powers of raising the birth-rate. But then the normal mode of procreation is capable of achieving results quite as remarkable. The queen Termite or White Ant, for instance—which, by the way, is no Ant, but a near relation of the Stone-flies—when in her prime will lay eggs at the rate of sixty a minute, or eighty thousand and upwards in the course of a day of twenty-four hours. But this unenviable mode of breaking the record is attended, surely, with some little inconvenience; for to attain to such fertility her abdomen increases until it attains something like two thousand times that of the workers of the community in which she lives. That the history of the queen Termite is unique of its kind is not surprising: indeed, such an amazing story could only be told of creatures which enjoyed the seclusion of a subterranean existence. Here, on a bare couch, with her Royal spouse beside her, she lies, a bloated, heaving mass, incapable of movement, depositing eggs with the rhythm of a machine, the mother of offspring which she will never see. A more unsightly picture of maternity it would be impossible to conceive: it is well, indeed, that it is hidden from the light of day. No such state of affairs could ever arise among creatures living an outdoor life, with enemies to avoid, and food to find. The instances just surveyed, these extremes of the potentiality of procreation, are instructive in more ways than one. They are to be regarded as “excrescences” of reproduction, comparable to those “excrescences” of individual growth which we call “ornament,” for example. Individuals on whom this fertility has settled, so to speak, are the victims of the machinery of sex and reproduction. Their amazing powers of multiplication are not of their own seeking, they are inherent manifestations of variations of growth, uncontrollable save by the machinery of Natural Selection. Incidentally such victims serve a useful purpose, for their myriad hosts afford food for hordes of other animals, which in turn are eaten. Little though we realize it, the well-being of the human race would suffer if these prolific creatures—the uncomplaining victims of that inexorable law which bids all living things “increase and multiply” or die—should cease to be; for with them would disappear a host of animals on whose existence man’s comfort more or less depends.