It will indeed be thought that I have an overweening confidence in the
principle of natural selection, when I do not admit that such wonderful and
well-established facts at once annihilate the theory. In the simpler case
of neuter insects all of one caste, which, as I believe, have been rendered
different from the fertile males and females through natural selection, we
may conclude from the analogy of ordinary variations, that the successive,
slight, profitable modifications did not first arise in all the neuters in
the same nest, but in some few alone; and that by the survival of the
communities with females which produced most neuters having the
advantageous modification, all the neuters ultimately came to be thus
characterized. According to this view we ought occasionally to find in the
same nest neuter-insects, presenting gradations of structure; and this we
do find, even not rarely, considering how few neuter-insects out of Europe
have been carefully examined. Mr. F. Smith has shown that the neuters of
several British ants differ surprisingly from each other in size and
sometimes in colour; and that the extreme forms can be linked together by
individuals taken out of the same nest: I have myself compared perfect
gradations of this kind. It sometimes happens that the larger or the
smaller sized workers are the most numerous; or that both large and small
are numerous, while those of an intermediate size are scanty in numbers.
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