Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/370

356 ants. Of the honey-secreting Aphides, and Cocci that serve them as milch-kine, some have large herds, some small ones, while others have none at all, and if they encounter an Aphis straightway kill and eat it. Is it not more probable that the ants first sought Aphides, like other insects, for this very purpose, but gradually discovered a way to turn them to better account, than that a flock of Aphides was, by some wonderful coincidence or interposition, placed within the reach of the first ant-hill?

It would, therefore, in our opinion, be exceedingly imprudent to declare that ant-civilization has not advanced, may not now be advancing, and may be destined to take yet further steps in the future, especially if large and fruitful portions of the globe are long allowed to remain in an uncultivated or semi-cultivated state. But such advances must necessarily be slow, as in all cases where there are no means of recording the experience of one generation for the benefit of the succeeding, and where what among mankind would be known as oral intercourse is limited by shortness of life. What direction these future advances may take, it is as difficult to indicate as to foretell the discoveries and inventions to be made by man during the next century. But we may safely say that they will not consist in the introduction of tools or weapons or machinery. Were man, in proportion to his size, about twenty times as strong as he is at present—were he provided by Nature with a pair of forceps, playing laterally, and capable of being used for felling trees, for excavating the ground, or for cutting off the heads of his enemies—he would scarcely have been a tool-inventing and tool-using animal. A being which, like the Sauba ants of Brazil, can construct a tunnel underneath the bed of a river as wide as the Thames at London Bridge, is in no need of shovels, pickaxes, or barrows.

That ants, in tropical climates, occasion much loss and annoyance to man is indisputable; yet the annihilation of all kinds of ants, were such a measure practicable, would scarcely be prudent. Here, as elsewhere, the rule holds good that small carnivora are to be cherished, and small herbivora and omnivora destroyed. The carnivorous ants, such as the Ecitons, are invaluable, from the myriads of cockroaches, scorpions, centipedes, venomous spiders, grasshoppers, and even rats and mice, that they destroy. They keep down serpents, also, by devouring their eggs. The plant-eaters, on the contrary, and especially the leaf-cutters, are an unalloyed evil, and their destruction ought to be attempted in a much more systematic way than what takes place at present. Nor can the "cattle-keeping" ants be tolerated. Even though they may not, in their own persons, attack the fruits and the leaves of useful trees, they compass injury to the latter by cherishing and defending swarms of such pernicious vermin as the Aphides of temperate regions and the scale-insects and tree-hoppers of warmer climates. All these live by sucking the juices of plants,