There are, however, many individual functions of the Arthropods the
exercise of which depends on the simultaneous change of several
skeletal parts; as, for instance, many of the 'singing' or vocal
apparatuses in insects. In quite recent times such vocal organs have
been discovered in ants, in which they consist of a small striated
region on the surface of the third abdominal segment, and a sharp ridge
on the segment in front; the latter is rubbed against the former by the
movements of the two segments. Quite a similar 'stridulating organ' has
long been known in the bee-ant (_Mutilla_), and the whistling sound
produced by it is easily heard by our ears; moreover August Forel has
heard it in the large wood-ant (_Camponotus ligniperdus_), and has
described it as an 'alarm-signal,' which the animals give each other
on the approach of danger--an observation which has recently been
confirmed by Wasmann and extended by Robert Wroughton in regard to
Indian ants. All these arrangements for producing sound depend always
on two organs, of which one resembles the bow, the other the strings
of a violin; the one is of no value without the other, and they must
therefore have developed simultaneously, yet they cannot have arisen
through use, and the inheritance of the results of use, because they
are both dead chitinous parts, which are never strengthened by rubbing
against each other with the movements of the abdomen, but are rather
worn away.
[Illustration: FIG. 91 (repeated). Hind-leg of a Grasshopper
(_Stenobothrus protorma_), after Graber. _fe_, femur. _ti_, tibia.
_ta_, tarsal joints. _schr_, the stridulating ridge.]
The same is true of the chirping organs of grasshoppers, beetles,
and crickets; in all cases they consist of two different parts,
which together produce a sound, and which therefore must have arisen
simultaneously, and the origin of which cannot be referred to the
inheritance of the results of exercise, but rather to selection. It is
thus possible that co-adaptation of at least two parts may take place
even when the hypothetical Lamarckian principle is altogether excluded.
When I say that we have here a case of two parts adapted to each
other, that is, strictly speaking, understating the case, for, in the
crickets and locusts, for instance, there is a whole series of peg-like
chitinous papillæ (Fig. 86), the so-called 'bridge,' each of which
must have arisen by itself through variation of the corresponding
spot of skin. At least I can see no ground for the assumption that
the chitinous surfaces on which the 'bridge' is now placed would
necessarily, from internal reasons, have varied precisely in the line
of the bridge as it has done.
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