Falling in Love

14. Go To The Ant

In the market-place at Santa F, in Mexico, peasant women from the

neighbouring villages bring in for sale trayfuls of living ants, each

about as big and round as a large white currant, and each entirely

filled with honey or grape sugar, much appreciated by the ingenuous

Mexican youth as an excellent substitute for Everton toffee. The method

of eating them would hardly command the approbation of the Society for

the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It is simple and primitive, but

decidedly not humane. Ingenuous youth holds the ant by its head and

shoulders, sucks out the honey with which the back part is absurdly

distended, and throws away the empty body as a thing with which it has

now no further sympathy. Maturer age buys the ants by the quart, presses

out the honey through a muslin strainer, and manufactures it into a very

sweet intoxicating drink, something like shandygaff, as I am credibly

informed by bold persons who have ventured to experiment upon it, taken

internally.

The curious insect which thus serves as an animated sweetmeat for the

Mexican children is the honey-ant of the Garden of the Gods; and it

affords a beautiful example of Mandeville's charming paradox that

personal vices are public benefits--_vitia privata humana commoda_. The

honey-ant is a greedy individual who has nevertheless nobly devoted

himself for the good of the community by converting himself into a

living honey-jar, from which all the other ants in his own nest may help

themselves freely from time to time, as occasion demands. The tribe to

which he belongs lives underground, in a dome-roofed vault, and only one

particular caste among the workers, known as rotunds from their

expansive girth, is told off for this special duty of storing honey

within their own bodies. Clinging to the top of their nest, with their

round, transparent abdomens hanging down loosely, mere globules of skin

enclosing the pale amber-coloured honey, these Daniel Lamberts of the

insect race look for all the world like clusters of the little American

Delaware grapes, with an ant's legs and head stuck awkwardly on to the

end instead of a stalk. They have, in fact, realised in everyday life

the awful fate of Mr. Gilbert's discontented sugar-broker, who laid on

flesh and 'adipose deposit' until he became converted at last into a

perfect rolling ball of globular humanity.

The manners of the honey-ant race are very simple. Most of the members

of each community are active and roving in their dispositions, and show

no tendency to undue distension of the nether extremities. They go out

at night and collect nectar or honey-dew from the gall-insects on

oak-trees; for the gall-insect, like love in the old Latin saw, is

fruitful both in sweets and bitters, _melle et felle_. This nectar they

then carry home, and give it to the rotunds or honey-bearers, who

swallow it and store it in their round abdomen until they can hold no

more, having stretched their skins literally to the very point of

bursting. They pass their time, like the Fat Boy in 'Pickwick,' chiefly

in sleeping, but they cling upside down meanwhile to the roof of their

residence. When the workers in turn require a meal, they go up to the

nearest honey-bearer and stroke her gently with their antenn. The

honey-bearer thereupon throws up her head and regurgitates a large drop

of the amber liquid. ('Regurgitates' is a good word which I borrow from

Dr. McCook, of Philadelphia, the great authority upon honey-ants; and it

saves an immense deal of trouble in looking about for a respectable

periphrasis.) The workers feed upon the drops thus exuded, two or three

at once often standing around the living honey-jar, and lapping nectar

together from the lips of their devoted comrade. This may seem at first

sight rather an unpleasant practice on the part of the ants; but after

all, how does it really differ from our own habit of eating honey which

has been treated in very much the same unsophisticated manner by the

domestic bee?

Worse things than these, however, Dr. McCook records to the discredit of

the Colorado honey-ant. When he was opening some nests in the Garden of

the Gods, he happened accidentally to knock down some of the rotunds,

which straightway burst asunder in the middle, and scattered their store

of honey on the floor of the nest. At once the other ants, tempted away

from their instinctive task of carrying off the cocoons and young grubs,

clustered around their unfortunate companion, like street boys around a

broken molasses barrel, and, instead of forming themselves forthwith

into a volunteer ambulance company, proceeded immediately to lap up the

honey from their dying brother. On the other hand it must be said, to

the credit of the race, that (unlike the members of Arctic expeditions)

they never desecrate the remains of the dead. When a honey-bearer dies

at his post, a victim to his zeal for the common good, the workers

carefully remove his cold corpse from the roof where it still clings,

clip off the head and shoulders from the distended abdomen, and convey

their deceased brother piecemeal, in two detachments, to the formican

cemetery, undisturbed. If they chose, they might only bury the front

half of their late relation, while they retained his remaining moiety

as an available honey-bag: but from this cannibal proceeding

ant-etiquette recoils in decent horror; and the amber globes are 'pulled

up galleries, rolled along rooms, and bowled into the graveyard, along

with the juiceless heads, legs, and other members.' Such fraternal

conduct would be very creditable to the worker honey-ants, were it not

for a horrid doubt insinuated by Dr. McCook that perhaps the insects

don't know they could get at the honey by breaking up the body of their

lamented relative. If so, their apparent disregard of utilitarian

considerations may really be due not to their sentimentality but to

their hopeless stupidity.

The reason why the ants have taken thus to storing honey in the living

bodies of their own fellows is easy enough to understand. They want to

lay up for the future like prudent insects that they are; but they can't

make wax, as the bees do, and they have not yet evolved the purely human

art of pottery. Consequently--happy thought--why not tell off some of

our number to act as jars on behalf of the others? Some of the community

work by going out and gathering honey; they also serve who only stand

and wait--who receive it from the workers, and keep it stored up in

their own capacious indiarubber maws till further notice. So obvious is

this plan for converting ants into animated honey-jars, that several

different kinds of ants in different parts of the world, belonging to

the most widely distinct families, have independently hit upon the very

self-same device. Besides the Mexican species, there is a totally

different Australian honey-ant, and another equally separate in Borneo

and Singapore. This last kind does not store the honey in the hind part

of the body technically known as the abdomen, but in the middle division

which naturalists call the thorax, where it forms a transparent

bladder-like swelling, and makes the creature look as though it were

suffering with an acute attack of dropsy. In any case, the life of a

honey-bearer must be singularly uneventful, not to say dull and

monotonous; but no doubt any small inconvenience in this respect must be

more than compensated for by the glorious consciousness that one is

sacrificing one's own personal comfort for the common good of universal

anthood. Perhaps, however, the ants have not yet reached the Positivist

stage, and may be totally ignorant of the enthusiasm of formicity.

Equally curious are the habits and manners of the harvesting ants, the

species which Solomon seems to have had specially in view when he

advised his hearers to go to the ant--a piece of advice which I have

also adopted as the title of the present article, though I by no means

intend thereby to insinuate that the readers of this volume ought

properly to be classed as sluggards. These industrious little creatures

abound in India: they are so small that it takes eight or ten of them to

carry a single grain of wheat or barley; and yet they will patiently

drag along their big burden for five hundred or a thousand yards to the

door of their formicary. To prevent the grain from germinating, they

bite off the embryo root--a piece of animal intelligence outdone by

another species of ant, which actually allows the process of budding to

begin, so as to produce sugar, as in malting. After the last

thunderstorms of the monsoon the little proprietors bring up all the

grain from their granaries to dry in the tropical sunshine. The quantity

of grain stored up by the harvesting ants is often so large that the

hair-splitting Jewish casuists of the Mishna have seriously discussed

the question whether it belongs to the landowner or may lawfully be

appropriated by the gleaners. 'They do not appear,' says Sir John

Lubbock, 'to have considered the rights of the ants.' Indeed our duty

towards insects is a question which seems hitherto to have escaped the

notice of all moral philosophers. Even Mr. Herbert Spencer, the prophet

of individualism, has never taken exception to our gross disregard of

the proprietary rights of bees in their honey, or of silkworms in their

cocoons. There are signs, however, that the obtuse human conscience is

awakening in this respect; for when Dr. Loew suggested to bee-keepers

the desirability of testing the commercial value of honey-ants, as

rivals to the bee, Dr. McCook replied that 'the sentiment against the

use of honey thus taken from living insects, which is worthy of all

respect, would not be easily overcome.'

There are no harvesting ants in Northern Europe, though they extend as

far as Syria, Italy, and the Riviera, in which latter station I have

often observed them busily working. What most careless observers take

for grain in the nests of English ants are of course really the cocoons

of the pup. For many years, therefore, entomologists were under the

impression that Solomon had fallen into this popular error, and that

when he described the ant as 'gathering her food in the harvest' and

'preparing her meat in the summer,' he was speaking rather as a poet

than as a strict naturalist. Later observations, however, have

vindicated the general accuracy of the much-married king by showing that

true harvesting ants do actually occur in Syria, and that they lay by

stores for the winter in the very way stated by that early entomologist,

whose knowledge of 'creeping things' is specially enumerated in the long

list of his universal accomplishments.

Dr. Lincecum of Texan fame has even improved upon Solomon by his

discovery of those still more interesting and curious creatures, the

agricultural ants of Texas. America is essentially a farming country,

and the agricultural ants are born farmers. They make regular clearings

around their nests, and on these clearings they allow nothing to grow

except a particular kind of grain, known as ant-rice. Dr. Lincecum

maintains that the tiny farmers actually sow and cultivate the ant-rice.

Dr. McCook, on the other hand, is of opinion that the rice sows itself,

and that the insects' part is limited to preventing any other plants or

weeds from encroaching on the appropriated area. In any case, be they

squatters or planters, it is certain that the rice, when ripe, is duly

harvested, and that it is, to say the least, encouraged by the ants, to

the exclusion of all other competitors. 'After the maturing and

harvesting of the seed,' says Dr. Lincecum, 'the dry stubble is cut away

and removed from the pavement, which is thus left fallow until the

ensuing autumn, when the same species of grass, and in the same circle,

appears again, and receives the same agricultural care as did the

previous crop.' Sir John Lubbock, indeed, goes so far as to say that the

three stages of human progress--the hunter, the herdsman, and the

agriculturist--are all to be found among various species of existing

ants.

The Saba ants of tropical America carry their agricultural operations a

step further. Dwelling in underground nests, they sally forth upon the

trees, and cut out of the leaves large round pieces, about as big as a

shilling. These pieces they drop upon the ground, where another

detachment is in waiting to convey them to the galleries of the nest.

There they store enormous quantities of these round pieces, which they

allow to decay in the dark, so as to form a sort of miniature mushroom

bed. On the mouldering vegetable heap they have thus piled up, they

induce a fungus to grow, and with this fungus they feed their young

grubs during their helpless infancy. Mr. Belt, the 'Naturalist in

Nicaragua,' found that native trees suffered far less from their

depredations than imported ones. The ants hardly touched the local

forests, but they stripped young plantations of orange, coffee, and

mango trees stark naked. He ingeniously accounts for this curious fact

by supposing that an internecine struggle has long been going on in the

countries inhabited by the Sabas between the ants and the forest trees.

Those trees that best resisted the ants, owing either to some unpleasant

taste or to hardness of foliage, have in the long run survived

destruction; but those which were suited for the purpose of the ants

have been reduced to nonentity, while the ants in turn were getting

slowly adapted to attack other trees. In this way almost all the native

trees have at last acquired some special means of protection against the

ravages of the leaf-cutters; so that they immediately fall upon all

imported and unprotected kinds as their natural prey. This ingenious and

wholly satisfactory explanation must of course go far to console the

Brazilian planters for the frequent loss of their orange and coffee

crops.

Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the Darwinian theory

(whose honours he waived with rare generosity in favour of the older and

more distinguished naturalist), tells a curious story about the

predatory habits of these same Sabas. On one occasion, when he was

wandering about in search of specimens on the Rio n***o, he bought a

peck of rice, which was tied up, Indian fashion, in the local bandanna

of the happy plantation slave. At night he left his rice incautiously on

the bench of the hut where he was sleeping; and next morning the Sabas

had riddled the handkerchief like a sieve, and carried away a gallon of

the grain for their own felonious purposes. The underground galleries

which they dig can often be traced for hundreds of yards; and Mr. Hamlet

Clarke even asserts that in one case they have tunnelled under the bed

of a river where it is a quarter of a mile wide. This beats Brunel on

his own ground into the proverbial c****d hat, both for depth and

distance.

Within doors, in the tropics, ants are apt to put themselves obtrusively

forward in a manner little gratifying to any except the enthusiastically

entomological mind. The winged females, after their marriage flight,

have a disagreeable habit of flying in at the open doors and windows at

lunch time, settling upon the table like the Harpies in the neid, and

then quietly shuffling off their wings one at a time, by holding them

down against the table-cloth with one leg, and running away vigorously

with the five others. As soon as they have thus disembarrassed

themselves of their superfluous members, they proceed to run about over

the lunch as if the house belonged to them, and to make a series of

experiments upon the edible qualities of the different dishes. One

doesn't so much mind their philosophical inquiries into the nature of

the bread or even the meat; but when they come to drowning themselves by

dozens, in the pursuit of knowledge, in the soup and sherry, one feels

bound to protest energetically against the spirit of martyrdom by which

they are too profoundly animated. That is one of the slight drawbacks of

the realms of perpetual summer; in the poets you see only one side of

the picture--the palms, the orchids, the humming-birds, the great

trailing lianas: in practical life you see the reverse side--the

thermometer at 98, the tepid drinking-water, the prickly heat, the

perpetual languor, the endless shoals of aggressive insects. A lady of

my acquaintance, indeed, made a valuable entomological collection in her

own dining-room, by the simple process of consigning to pill-boxes all

the moths and flies and beetles that settled upon the mangoes and

star-apples in the course of dessert.

Another objectionable habit of the tropical ants, viewed practically,

is their total disregard of vested interests in the case of house

property. Like Mr. George and his communistic friends, they disbelieve

entirely in the principle of private rights in real estate. They will

eat their way through the beams of your house till there is only a

slender core of solid wood left to support the entire burden. I have

taken down a rafter in my own house in Jamaica, originally 18 inches

thick each way, with a sound circular centre of no more than 6 inches in

diameter, upon which all the weight necessarily fell. With the material

extracted from the wooden beams they proceed to add insult to injury by

building long covered galleries right across the ceiling of your

drawing-room. As may be easily imagined, these galleries do not tend to

improve the appearance of the ceiling; and it becomes necessary to form

a Liberty and Property Defence League for the protection of one's

personal interests against the insect enemy. I have no objection to ants

building galleries on their own freehold, or even to their nationalising

the land in their native forests; but I do object strongly to their

unwarrantable intrusion upon the domain of private life. Expostulation

and active warfare, however, are equally useless. The carpenter-ant has

no moral sense, and is not amenable either to kindness or blows. On one

occasion, when a body of these intrusive creatures had constructed an

absurdly conspicuous brown gallery straight across the ceiling of my

drawing-room, I determined to declare open war against them, and,

getting my black servant to bring in the steps and a mop, I proceeded to

demolish the entire gallery just after breakfast. It was about 20 feet

long, as well as I can remember, and perhaps an inch in diameter. At one

o'clock I returned to lunch. My black servant pointed, with a broad grin

on his intelligent features, to the wooden ceiling. I looked up; in

those three hours the carpenter-ants had reconstructed the entire

gallery, and were doubtless mocking me at their ease, with their

uplifted antenn, under that safe shelter. I retired at once from the

unequal contest. It was clearly impossible to go on knocking down a

fresh gallery every three hours of the day or night throughout a whole

lifetime.

Ants, says Mr. Wallace, without one touch of satire, 'force themselves

upon the attention of everyone who visits the tropics.' They do, indeed,

and that most pungently; if by no other method, at least by the simple

and effectual one of stinging. The majority of ants in every nest are of

course neuters, or workers, that is to say, strictly speaking,

undeveloped females, incapable of laying eggs. But they still retain the

ovipositor, which is converted into a sting, and supplied with a

poisonous liquid to eject afterwards into the wound. So admirably

adapted to its purpose is this beautiful provision of nature, that some

tropical ants can sting with such violence as to make your leg swell and

confine you for some days to your room; while cases have even been known

in which the person attacked has fainted with pain, or had a serious

attack of fever in consequence. It is not every kind of ant, however,

that can sting; a great many can only bite with their little hard horny

jaws, and then eject a drop of formic poison afterwards into the hole

caused by the bite. The distinction is a delicate physiological one, not

much appreciated by the victims of either mode of attack. The perfect

females can also sting, but not, of course, the males, who are poor,

wretched, useless creatures, only good as husbands for the community,

and dying off as soon as they have performed their part in the

world--another beautiful provision, which saves the workers the trouble

of killing them off, as bees do with drones after the marriage flight of

the queen bee.

The blind driver-ants of West Africa are among the very few species

that render any service to man, and that, of course, only incidentally.

Unlike most other members of their class, the driver-ants have no

settled place of residence; they are vagabonds and wanderers upon the

face of the earth, formican tramps, blind beggars, who lead a gipsy

existence, and keep perpetually upon the move, smelling their way

cautiously from one camping-place to another. They march by night, or on

cloudy days, like wise tropical strategists, and never expose themselves

to the heat of the day in broad sunshine, as though they were no better

than the mere numbered British Tommy Atkins at Coomassie or in the

Soudan. They move in vast armies across country, driving everything

before them as they go; for they belong to the stinging division, and

are very voracious in their personal habits. Not only do they eat up the

insects in their line of march, but they fall even upon larger creatures

and upon big snakes, which they attack first in the eyes, the most

vulnerable portion. When they reach a n***o village the inhabitants turn

out _en masse_, and run away, exactly as if the visitors were English

explorers or brave Marines, bent upon retaliating for the theft of a

knife by nobly burning down King Tom's town or King Jumbo's capital.

Then the n*****s wait in the jungle till the little black army has

passed on, after clearing out the huts by the way of everything eatable.

When they return they find their calabashes and saucepans licked clean,

but they also find every rat, mouse, lizard, cockroach, gecko, and

beetle completely cleared out from the whole village. Most of them have

cut and run at the first approach of the drivers; of the remainder, a

few blanched and neatly-picked skeletons alone remain to tell the tale.

As I wish to be considered a veracious historian, I will not retail the

further strange stories that still find their way into books of natural

history about the manners and habits of these blind marauders. They

cross rivers, the West African gossips declare, by a number of devoted

individuals flinging themselves first into the water as a living bridge,

like so many six-legged Marcus Curtiuses, while over their drowning

bodies the heedless remainder march in safety to the other side. If the

story is not true, it is at least well invented; for the

ant-commonwealth everywhere carries to the extremest pitch the old Roman

doctrine of the absolute subjection of the individual to the State. So

exactly is this the case that in some species there are a few large,

overgrown, lazy ants in each nest, which do no work themselves, but

accompany the workers on their expeditions; and the sole use of these

idle mouths seems to be to attract the attention of birds and other

enemies, and so distract it from the useful workers, the mainstay of the

entire community. It is almost as though an army, marching against a

tribe of cannibals, were to place itself in the centre of a hollow

square formed of all the fattest people in the country, whose fine

condition and fitness for killing might immediately engross the

attention of the hungry enemy. Ants, in fact, have, for the most part,

already reached the goal set before us as a delightful one by most

current schools of socialist philosophers, in which the individual is

absolutely sacrificed in every way to the needs of the community.

The most absurdly human, however, among all the tricks and habits of

ants are their well known cattle-farming and slaveholding instincts.

Everybody has heard, of course, how they keep the common rose-blight as

milch cows, and suck from them the sweet honey-dew. But everybody,

probably, does not yet know the large number of insects which they herd

in one form or another as domesticated animals. Man has, at most, some

twenty or thirty such, including cows, sheep, horses, donkeys, camels,

llamas, alpacas, reindeer, dogs, cats, canaries, pigs, fowl, ducks,

geese, turkeys, and silkworms. But ants have hundreds and hundreds, some

of them kept obviously for purposes of food; others apparently as pets;

and yet others again, as has been plausibly suggested, by reason of

superstition or as objects of worship. There is a curious blind beetle

which inhabits ants' nests, and is so absolutely dependent upon its

hosts for support that it has even lost the power of feeding itself. It

never quits the nest, but the ants bring it in food and supply it by

putting the nourishment actually into its mouth. But the beetle, in

return, seems to secrete a sweet liquid (or it may even be a stimulant

like beer, or a narcotic like tobacco) in a tuft of hairs near the

bottom of the hard wing-cases, and the ants often lick this tuft with

every appearance of satisfaction and enjoyment. In this case, and in

many others, there can be no doubt that the insects are kept for the

sake of food or some other advantage yielded by them.

But there are other instances of insects which haunt ants' nests, which

it is far harder to account for on any hypothesis save that of

superstitious veneration. There is a little weevil that runs about by

hundreds in the galleries of English ants, in and out among the free

citizens, making itself quite at home in their streets and public

places, but as little noticed by the ants themselves as dogs are in our

own cities. Then, again, there is a white woodlouse, something like the

common little armadillo, but blind from having lived so long

underground, which walks up and down the lanes and alleys of antdom,

without ever holding any communication of any sort with its hosts and

neighbours. In neither case has Sir John Lubbock ever seen an ant take

the slightest notice of the presence of these strange fellow-lodgers.

'One might almost imagine,' he says, 'that they had the cap of

invisibility.' Yet it is quite clear that the ants deliberately sanction

the residence of the weevils and woodlice in their nests, for any

unauthorised intruder would immediately be set upon and massacred

outright.

Sir John Lubbock suggests that they may perhaps be tolerated as

scavengers: or, again, it is possible that they may prey upon the eggs

or larv of some of the parasites to whose attacks the ants are subject.

In the first case, their use would be similar to that of the wild dogs

in Constantinople or the common black John-crow vultures in tropical

America: in the second case, they would be about equivalent to our own

cats or to the hedgehog often put in farmhouse kitchens to keep down

cockroaches.

The crowning glory of owning slaves, which many philosophic Americans

(before the war) showed to be the highest and noblest function of the

most advanced humanity, has been attained by more than one variety of

anthood. Our great English horse-ant is a moderate slaveholder; but the

big red ant of Southern Europe carries the domestic institution many

steps further. It makes regular slave-raids upon the nests of the small

brown ants, and carries off the young in their pupa condition. By-and-by

the brown ants hatch out in the strange nest, and never having known any

other life except that of slavery, accommodate themselves to it readily

enough. The red ant, however, is still only an occasional slaveowner; if

necessary, he can get along by himself, without the aid of his little

brown servants. Indeed, there are free states and slave states of red

ants side by side with one another, as of old in Maryland and

Pennsylvania: in the first, the red ants do their work themselves, like

mere vulgar Ohio farmers; in the second, they get their work done for

them by their industrious little brown servants, like the aristocratic

first families of Virginia before the earthquake of emancipation.

But there are other degraded ants, whose life-history may be humbly

presented to the consideration of the Anti-Slavery Society, as speaking

more eloquently than any other known fact for the demoralising effect of

slaveowning upon the slaveholders themselves. The Swiss rufescent ant is

a species so long habituated to rely entirely upon the services of

slaves that it is no longer able to manage its own affairs when deprived

by man of its hereditary bondsmen. It has lost entirely the art of

constructing a nest; it can no longer tend its own young, whom it leaves

entirely to the care of n***o nurses; and its bodily structure even has

changed, for the jaws have lost their teeth, and have been converted

into mere nippers, useful only as weapons of war. The rufescent ant, in

fact, is a purely military caste, which has devoted itself entirely to

the pursuit of arms, leaving every other form of activity to its slaves

and dependents. Officers of the old school will be glad to learn that

this military insect is dressed, if not in scarlet, at any rate in very

decent red, and that it refuses to be bothered in any way with questions

of transport or commissariat. If the community changes its nest, the

masters are carried on the backs of their slaves to the new position,

and the black ants have to undertake the entire duty of foraging and

bringing in stores of supply for their gentlemanly proprietors. Only

when war is to be made upon neighbouring nests does the thin red line

form itself into long file for active service. Nothing could be more

perfectly aristocratic than the views of life entertained and acted upon

by these distinguished slaveholders.

On the other hand, the picture has its reverse side, exhibiting clearly

the weak points of the slaveholding system. The rufescent ant has lost

even the very power of feeding itself. So completely dependent is each

upon his little black valet for daily bread, that he cannot so much as

help himself to the food that is set before him. Hber put a few

slaveholders into a box with some of their own larv and pup, and a

supply of honey, in order to see what they would do with them. Appalled

at the novelty of the situation, the slaveholders seemed to come to the

conclusion that something must be done; so they began carrying the larv

about aimlessly in their mouths, and rushing up and down in search of

the servants. After a while, however, they gave it up and came to the

conclusion that life under such circumstances was clearly intolerable.

They never touched the honey, but resigned themselves to their fate like

officers and gentlemen. In less than two days, half of them had died of

hunger, rather than taste a dinner which was not supplied to them by a

properly constituted footman. Admiring their heroism or pitying their

incapacity, Hber at last gave them just one slave between them all. The

plucky little n***o, nothing daunted by the gravity of the situation,

set to work at once, dug a small nest, gathered together the larv,

helped several pup out of the cocoon, and saved the lives of the

surviving slaveowners. Other naturalists have tried similar experiments,

and always with the same result. The slaveowners will starve in the

midst of plenty rather than feed themselves without attendance. Either

they cannot or will not put the food into their own mouths with their

own mandibles.

There are yet other ants, such as the workerless _Anergates_, in which

the degradation of slaveholding has gone yet further. These wretched

creatures are the formican representatives of those Oriental despots who

are no longer even warlike, but are sunk in sloth and luxury, and pass

their lives in eating bang or smoking opium. Once upon a time, Sir John

Lubbock thinks, the ancestors of _Anergates_ were marauding

slaveowners, who attacked and made serfs of other ants. But gradually

they lost not only their arts but even their military prowess, and were

reduced to making war by stealth instead of openly carrying off their

slaves in fair battle. It seems probable that they now creep into a nest

of the far more powerful slave ants, poison or assassinate the queen,

and establish themselves by sheer usurpation in the queenless nest.

'Gradually,' says Sir John Lubbock, 'even their bodily force dwindled

away under the enervating influence to which they had subjected

themselves, until they sank to their present degraded condition--weak in

body and mind, few in numbers, and apparently nearly extinct, the

miserable representatives of far superior ancestors maintaining a

precarious existence as contemptible parasites of their former slaves.'

One may observe in passing that these wretched do-nothings cannot have

been the ants which Solomon commended to the favourable consideration of

the sluggard; though it is curious that the text was never pressed into

the service of defence for the peculiar institution by the advocates of

slavery in the South, who were always most anxious to prove the

righteousness of their cause by most sure and certain warranty of Holy

Scripture.