Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/698

680 lives of their community even against its own ignorance or carelessness. The prohibition of nests in the unsafe tree is a step toward sanitary legislation.

But there are other instances, instructive in their way, where rooks interfere with members of their own community without any apparent cause. White remarks (Selborne, Observations on Various Parts of Nature), "If a pair offer to build on a single tree, the nest is plundered and demolished at once." This has been repeatedly observed by other naturalists where the trees were quite unexceptionable in point of soundness. Surely these birds, by their conduct in such cases, remind us of certain proceedings of our own species. The rooks who persecute their fellow-citizens who build on unauthorized trees are exactly like human beings who claim a vested interest in their neighbors' speculative opinions, who carry scientific questions to be decided upon in a police court, who dictate what may be discussed and what must be ignored, and who seek to limit the methods of scientific research. Hence the rooks are probably the first animals which have evolved the vice of intolerance. Censorships, anti-vivisection agitations, the imprisonment or execution of discoverers, may thus be traced down the zoölogical series, and may be deemed the ultimate transformation of the tabooed trees near the rookery. In the rooks, as in the demos of ancient Athens, as G. H. Lewes pointed out, it is curious that the first distinct manifestation of intolerance should be in a republican community. Perhaps here, as elsewhere, political freedom has to be bought at the price of intellectual and moral bondage.

The laws of ants are probably more complete and intricate than those of the rookery. In the ant-hill the individual is completely absorbed in and subjected to the interests of the community. Cases which seem to indicate sanitary legislation have been observed by Sir John Lubbock and others. Theft in communist societies like those of ants can not occur, and needs, therefore, no repression. Neglect of duty does occasionally take place, and it has been seen to be promptly punished with death. Among the agricultural ants of Texas prisoners have been known to be brought in by a fellow-citizen and handed over in a very rough manner to the guards who are always on duty on the level ground before the city, and who carry the offender into the underground passages. Working ants (Mrs. L. Hutton, Journal of the Linnæan Society, vol. v, p. 217) have been seen to be killed by their companions, apparently as the penalty of inaction.

It is sometimes contended that the divisions of the human species in general, or of any of its races and subraces, into nations, tribes, and clans, is a phenomenon which has no parallel among the lower animals. This view is a grave error. Almost every truly