Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/115

Rh -Habits of Wood-Ants," wherein occurs the statement that, if the ants were immersed in water and placed on the ant-hills, they were invariably attacked by other ants as enemies, etc. This action is so at variance with what I have observed, that I will mention an incident which occurred while I was botanizing in Wisconsin last summer. In passing by a large stump I observed that the top was covered with large wood-ants. They were feeding on crumbs of bread left by some school-children. On the stump was a depression, where the ants were in large numbers. Procuring some water from a lake close by, I poured it into the depression, submerging several dozen ants. The most of them swam to the margin; others were in danger of drowning. What was my astonishment to see those who had escaped rush into the water, seize their drowning fellows, and drag them to the shore, where they tenderly turned them over until satisfied they were alive, when the rescuers went back and tried to save others! A few were dragged out too late—they were dead. These were turned over, felt of by the antennæ of the rescuers, and left for dead. In no instance was there any appearance of violence to the wet ants by the dry ones. The intelligence shown by these ants was greater than I had ever dreamed they possessed, and since that time I have had a most sincere respect for my lowly fellow-laborers.



HE death by suicide, not long ago, of a brilliant student of Cornell University, Emil Schwerdtfeger, at the age of nineteen, has a painful interest in connection with the subject of education. We are glad to see that the case has elicited some wholesome comment on the part of the press, in regard to the influences to which he was subjected, and the system of culture that supplies them; and we think the lesson that has been drawn ought to be enforced upon the public mind in the most pointed and emphatic manner.

It seems that the young man had fallen into a state of hopeless depression, after a course of successful study, in which he had made the most remarkable proficiency in the languages. His mental condition reminds us of that through which John Stuart Mill passed, when about the same age, after being subjected by his father to that long and terrible discipline of acquisition which is so fully described in his autobiography and has been curiously confirmed by a letter lately discovered, written by young Mill at the age of thirteen to Sir Samuel Bentham. After being crammed with knowledge in the most systematic way—dead languages, classical literature, history, mathematics, and political economy—from early childhood, by poring over books, until he became a perfect prodigy of erudition, he passed into a cloud of melancholy, in which his future life seemed vacant and hopeless. All the fountains of impulse that had previously incited him to effort seemed dried up in his gloomy dejection. He went on with his work mechanically, but without interest, while this portion of his life, or what he did in it, was afterward hardly remembered. He subsequently described his case in the following lines from Coleridge:

He was not free from suggestions of self-destruction which arise in such mental conditions, as we gather from the following remarks: "I frequently asked myself if I could, or if I was bound to, go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year." It was unquestionably a case of 