Page:Ant communities and how they are governed; a study in natural civics (IA antcommunitiesho00mcco).pdf/22

 consider them, in their relations to the highest welfare of the race.

The association of separate groups of individuals to accomplish the primary aims of physical life is almost sure to develop resemblance in methods. What are those aims? Among ants, as the following pages will show, they are the establishment of a home; procurement of a livelihood; protection from enemies; preservation and nurture of the young and other communal dependents; perpetuation of the species, and the propagation of the commune.

Wherein do these differ from the common necessities and aims of men in their social aggregations? They are practically the same. The Great Hand of Sovereign Nature that has laid upon her children these common aims has so guided them in the achieving thereof, that, amid the endless variations which issue from an Infinite Fountain of Design and Force, one traces resemblances in methods that suggest their common origin. In our studies, these likenesses, as well as unlikenesses and contrasts, will be interesting to note.

In many of the higher and complex duties of human communities it is impossible that insects should be models for men, in whom there is an element that separates from all other creatures by an impassable gulf. But in the great physical functions of a commune, which are a bond of sympathy between us, we may have something to learn from the ants, who manifestly have kept and still keep to the primitive ways of nature more closely than we. Sometimes these lessons have been pointed out, sometimes simply suggested, sometimes left for the reader to discern. But whether the one or the other, the author ventures to hope that they may