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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: produced more and more of the smaller workers, until all the workers had
come to be in this condition; we should then have had a species of ant with
neuters very nearly in the same condition with 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 to find gradations
in important points of structure 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
On the Origin of Species |
