I need not comment upon the well-known facts that ants are insects allied to the other Hymenoptera like the bees and wasps; that but one of the community, the queen, produces any progeny; that the community is divided into defined castes of wingless and aborted females, who are the workers, and winged males, who are an idle and worthless class, except as to the one which fertilizes the queen, whereupon the useless herd of drones is killed, submitting to this fate with resignation. The ants select places for building the communal dwelling with great care and judgment in reference to drainage and the nature of the soil. Rooms are provided in the general pueblo, so to speak, for use as nurseries in the rearing of the young as well as for the storage and preservation of food. Two of the notable advances of the human race toward civilization were the domestication of animals and the cultivation of plants, yet the leaf-cutting ants, in rooms provided by them in the communal dwelling, fertilize their darkened fields and cultivate minute plants that furnish a store of food. Likewise the honey ants, who live mainly upon the sweet juices of trees and plants, have their droves of aphides, which live upon and secrete for their ant-owners the sweet saps of trees. These droves are herded and regularly milked by the worker ants. They are in every sense the domesticated animals of the ants.
Then, too, these astonishing ants have learned the lesson of communal sanitation. Personal cleanliness and cleanliness of the dwelling are rigidly enforced among them. They are indefatigible in removing all sorts of litter and refuse of food from their homes. They even harbor beetles, it is said, in their nests, who are kept for the purpose of removing the communal garbage. The homes are regularly closed and sealed each day, and as regularly opened, and sentries are posted for guarding the gates.
Human maintenance of roads is a comparatively late development of civilization. The ants, however, have their made roads stretching from their homes in all directions, which seem to be laid out with care and which they follow in their food or predatory excursions. When, in making a road, they come to a rill of water, they tunnel it in true engineering fashion and maintain the tunnel. The building of a cylindrical arch is a great invention of our race, but the ants were doing it before the lowest type of humanity appeared on this planet. The leaf-cutting ants are ingenious enough to sew leaves together to suit their purposes.
The ants have their predatory instinct against strangers, just as our human race had and still has it. A column of driver ants on the march, devouring every creature they meet, is probably the fiercest carnivorous horde on this globe. A settled tribe of ants has its scouts who, like the scouts who spied out the Promised Land, go forth to look over the land and, when they find a commune of another tribe such as they desire to attack, rush back to the main body of the tribe and make some report; then the army, in a scene of frantic excitement, imitated in our cities when troops go forth to war, begins to form. The whole tribe, except the drones, rushes forth from its dwelling and takes up its march; it arrives at the place of attack, and a sudden savage onslaught is made. The tribe that is attacked fights gallantly for its homes and firesides. The assaulting army of female workers, like the standing army of women of Dahomey or the Amazon bands of Penthesilea on “the windy plain of Troy,” fights as gallantly; at last all the warriors of the one tribe are killed, and the young and immature captives are carried away to be nurtured and brought up to increase the slave hordes of the conquerors. This is very like the Athenian conquest of the island of Melos, as related by Thucydides. It is very like the command to the Jews in Deuteronomy: “When the Lord thy God hath delivered it (a city) into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword. But the women, and the little ones and the cattle...shalt thou take unto thyself.” And such is the primitive law of war everywhere among men.
The maintenance of slaves is probably the most curious anticipation of the ants. The slave ants are obedient and hard-working; they seem to be satisfied with their condition and are devoted to their masters. Certain tribes of ants are perfectly helpless, and depend for their lives upon their slaves. The ants, of course, instinctively are seeking more workers, and the origin of slavery among men is precisely the same. Ants have no weapons, but some of them develop better natural means of attack, for among ants which have the soldier caste, who have larger heads and more powerful jaws, there is shown an improved type of “shock troops” who seem to be irresistible.
As a patriot devoted to her tribe and homeland, the ant is a wonderful creature. She knows no fear; she fights with devoted courage; she is eager for battle; she hurls herself upon the foe; she never retreats; either she dies on the field or she never leaves the field until the battle is won. The ant knows no good for herself as separated from the good of the community. If service be the test, she is entitled to the highest praise. She is an indefatigable worker and carries, for her, immense burdens. Her strength in proportion to her size is prodigious. If the burden is too heavy for one, two or more unite in the work. Her readiness to sacrifice herself for the public welfare is amazing.
With the altruistic civic service of the honey ants nothing in human life can compare. Certain of these workers act as reservoirs for food. They load themselves with sweet juices until their abdomens are for their size enormously distended; then they laboriously make their way to the home, and are helped by other ants up the wall of the room to the ceiling, and there they cling day in and day out until their store of honey is required by the society. Coöperation for the public good is the absolute law of ant life, and this law is scrupulously obeyed. But at the same time this intensity of communal life and feeling results among ants, as it often has resulted among men, in a bitter hostility toward all stranger ants. We have seen how remorseless they are in sacking the home of another community and in reducing its dwellers to slavery. Many an experiment has shown that stranger ants introduced into an ant community are at once set upon and killed.
It is a commonplace of observation of ants that the peculiarity of this organized community is that there is no apparent organization. Each individual seems to act on his own initiative, without directions or orders. There are no superiors or inferiors. The ideal of absolute equality reigns. There is no overlord, no standing army, no officers, no privates. There is a most effective government, but there are no governors. The varied and complicated facts of government in a great ant-city, its home-making, home-guarding, home-nurturing, its building of roads, storerooms, nurseries, and vast structures that, proportionately to the size of ants, are equal to great centers of human population, the gathering and distribution of supplies, the cultivation and storing of crops, the keeping of herds, waging of war, and utilizing of captives, are carried out with perfect regularity. The laws are self-enforced, are apparently never violated, and this work goes on with the regularity and precision of an automatic machine, “without guide, overseer or ruler.” Ants have lived under their laws so long that they have become perfectly fitted to them, and even the time for closing the gates requires no warning sound of a curfew. Is it not plain that ants can live and work without direction or guide because, acting by instinct, they all act precisely alike?
It cannot be denied that this experiment of Nature is, to the extent that it has gone or can go, perfectly successful. The ants have certainly a considerable degree of what we usually call intelligence. And this is so with many other animals. A herd of musk-oxen in the frozen north, when it hears the hungry cry of a band of wolves, throws itself into battle array. The bulls face outward in a circle, standing shoulder to shoulder and presenting a ring of menacing horns to the foe. The cows and calves are all protected inside the barrier of menacing horns. It seems difficult to distinguish this conduct of musk-oxen from that of a wagon train of emigrants, let us say in 1850, crossing the western plains in the United States. When an Indian attack was impending, the wagons were arranged in a circle with the human beings, the horses and cattle