[On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin]@TWC D-Link book
On the Origin of Species

CHAPTER VIII
49/53

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.


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