Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/564

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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

or dependent stage, that is, she is unable to found a colony or even to exist apart from workers of her own species. And as the queen ant passes most of her life in similar dependence on her workers, namely, after establishing her colony, the earlier and more characteristic manifestations of her instincts and her marvelous initiative and plasticity were either disregarded or deemed to be of little importance. Attention was concentrated on the worker slave-makers whose activities represent a combination of queen and worker instincts. Darwin was thus led to derive the slave-making from the foraging instincts, and Wasmann—well Wasmann could only keep repeating or implying that the slavemaking ants made slaves, because they were endowed with a slavemaking instinct—a fine modern example of Molière's famous opium fallacy and of the resources of scholastic methods in zoology! Wasmann supposed that F. sanguinea is possessed of an extraordinary fondness for educating the young of the alien fusca. This was quite incomprehensible, especially as sanguinea workers are in no respect degenerate or dependent on their auxiliaries. Since I have examined many colonies of the European sanguinea, which, as a rule, rears much fewer auxiliaries than our American forms of the same species, Wasmann's assumption seems to me to be preposterous. After the habits of our temporary parasites and especially after the behavior of the young sanguinea queens had been studied, the relations of the dulotic species to particular hosts were easily understood, for the young queens are reared by workers of a particular host species (fusca or schaufussi or some of their varieties) or at any rate meet them frequently in the parental