The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th EditionDarwin, Charles
History
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th Edition
Darwin, Charles
Evolution (Biology); Natural selection
smaller workers than can be accounted for merely by their
proportionately lesser size; and I fully believe, though I dare not
assert so positively, that the workers of intermediate size have their
ocelli in an exactly intermediate condition. So that here we have two
bodies of sterile workers in the same nest, differing not only in size,
but in their organs of vision, yet connected by some few members in an
intermediate condition. I may digress by adding, that if the smaller
workers had been the most useful to the community, and those males and
females had been continually selected, which produced more and more of
the smaller workers, until all the workers were in this condition; we
should then have had a species of ant with neuters in nearly the same
condition as those of Myrmica. For the workers of Myrmica have not even
rudiments of ocelli, though the male and female ants of this genus have
well-developed ocelli.
I may give one other case: so confidently did I expect occasionally to
find gradations of important structures between the different castes of
neuters in the same species, that I gladly availed myself of Mr. F.
Smith’s offer of numerous specimens from the same nest of the driver
ant (Anomma) of West Africa. The reader will perhaps best appreciate
the amount of difference in these workers by my giving, not the actual
measurements, but a strictly accurate illustration: the difference was
the same as if we were to see a set of workmen building a house, of
whom many were five feet four inches high, and many sixteen feet high;
but we must in addition suppose that the larger workmen had heads four
instead of three times as big as those of the smaller men, and jaws
nearly five times as big. The jaws, moreover, of the working ants of
the several sizes differed wonderfully in shape, and in the form and
number of the teeth. But the important fact for us is that, though the
workers can be grouped into castes of different sizes, yet they
graduate insensibly into each other, as does the widely-different
structure of their jaws. I speak confidently on this latter point, as
Sir J. Lubbock made drawings for me, with the camera lucida, of the
jaws which I dissected from the workers of the several sizes. Mr.
Bates, in his interesting “Naturalist on the Amazons,” has described
analogous cases.
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