Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/347

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a helpful adjunct to nature-play. These more primitive people are but grown up children, living in that closer touch with nature often forbidden the dwellers in brick apartments. The beginnings of romance are found in the thrilling adventures of "Brer Rabbit" and the contest of "B'Helephant and B' Wale." Such mythical tales as "Why the Bat is Blind" and "How the Animals Secured Fire" are among the first fanciful attempts to account for natural phenomena. Boys and girls are at home with the ant people, while these intelligent and industrious creatures transport and care for their young, hunt their enemies, cultivate their aphid herds, or fill their subterranean granaries with the seeds which the workers have harvested. We shall not deny mind in the ants simply because they do not perceive and think just as we do. It is quite as efficacious to touch and smell at the same time, through antennal end organs, as to have these functions separately performed through fingers