Page:Ants, Wheeler (1910).djvu/36

4 easier for a terrestrial than an aërial animal. When it is necessary to build, the latter must, like the bee, either secrete the substance of its nest or seek it at a distance, as does the been when she collects propolis, or the wasp when she gathers materials close at hand, and its architecutre may be as varied as these materials. Ants, therefore, probably owe their social and industrial superiority to their habitat."

The dominance of ants is clearly indicated by the small number of their enemies. They are preyed upon by comparatively few mammals, birds, reptiles, parasitic insects and other ants. And however much their philoprogenitive instincts may be exploited by their various guests and mess-mates, the adult ants enjoy, in temperate regions at least, a singular immunity. A further indication of dominance is seen in the peculiar and widely distributed defensive modifications of the integument of those animals which are most frequently exposed to the attack of ant colonies. The scales of reptiles, the feathers of birds and the hairs of mammals and caterpillars suggest themselves as defensive adaptations. At any rate it would be difficult to conceive of structures better suited to the protection of arboreal and terrestrial animals against these ubiquitous insects.

Some very striking resemblances between human and ant societies are implied in the fact already mentioned, that animal communities, in order to deserve the name societies, must have certain fundamental traits in common. Indeed, the resemblances between men and ants are so very conspicuous that they were noted even by aboriginal thinkers, Folk-lore and primitive poetry and philosophy show the ants as an abiding source of similes expressing the fervid activity and coöperation of men. Although these similes have become trite from repetition, the scientific student can hardly free himself from the many anthropomorphisms which they suggest. He is forced to admit that the social and physical ascendancy of the ants among invertebrates and of the mammals among vertebrates, constitutes a very striking example of convergent development. And the paleontologist may be included to admit that this convergence has a deeper significance, that it may have been due, in fact, since ants and mammals seem to make their appearance simultaneously in Mesozoic times, to some peculiar transitory conditions that favored the birth of forms destined to dominance through extraordinary psychical endowment. What these conditions were we have but the slenderest hope of ever knowing. Perhaps they may be conceived as having favored psychical mutations, which are