Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/281

Rh of fiercest rage and defiance. Pitched battles sometimes occur between different pugnacious species, and classical writers have deemed them worthy to be recorded. Kirby and Spence relate that "Æneas Sylvius, after giving a circumstantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by a large and a small species, adds that 'this action was fought in the Pontificate of Eugenius IV.'" Thoreau gives a graphic description—in his whimsical style of exalting small things and emphasizing the trifling difference that there is between big and little actors and events in Nature—of a similar engagement that took place near his hut "in the presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster's Fugitive Slave Bill" ("Walden," p. 346).

Whether such an enactment obtains in any of the ant nations is unknown, but that certain of them possess the extraordinary instinct of capturing the pupæ of other species and bringing them up as slaves, is a well-authenticated fact. They are made captive while still in the cocoon, and on emerging become the auxiliary workers and friends of their captors, as though such was their natural destiny.

But no fanciful exaggeration is needed to impress us with the degree of forethought, methodical industry, and dauntless courage, the engineering and mechanical skill, the reasoning and perceptive powers and general sagacity which the ant displays.

If space permitted, numerous illustrative citations could be given. A member of the Natural History Society describes a tubular bridge, half an inch in diameter, and spanning a chasm twelve inches across. A correspondent of Mr. Darwin's, Mr. Joseph D. Hague, a geologist of California, submits what seems to be satisfactory evidence that they realize danger from seeing the corpses of their fellows, an inference drawn by no other invertebrate, if indeed it be by the higher animals.

They keep domestic animals. The aphides, or plant-lice, excrete a peculiar sweet fluid which the ant obtains by caressing the abdomen of the aphis with its antennæ. Ordinarily they seek the aphides upon plants, but that they also keep them in their nests much as man keeps cows, is an opinion which receives the sanction of eminent naturalists, among them Sir John Lubbock, who further says: "Ants also keep a variety of beetles and other insects in their nests. That they have some reason for this seems clear, because they readily attack any unwelcome intruder; but what that reason is we do not yet know. If these insects are domesticated by the ants, then we must admit that the ants possess more domestic animals than we do."

Indeed, their whole social economy is of a complex order. Nowhere is the division of labor—which in mankind always marks a high state of civilization—so rigid, being carried to the extreme of a physical modification of great numbers of the community for the better fulfillment of their duties. Their undeveloped sterile females may serve to warn—or to encourage—those members of the Anthropidæ