CHAPTER XV. 



THE DRIVER AND LEGIONARY ANTS. 



" When we see these intelligent insects dwelling together in orderly com- 

 munities of many thousands of individuals, their social instincts developed to a 

 high degree of perfection, making their marches with the regularity of disci- 

 plined troops, showing ingenuity in the crossing of difficult places, assisting each 

 other in danger, defending their nests at the risk of their own lives, communi- 

 cating information rapidly to a great distance, making a regular division of work, 

 the whole community taking charge of the rearing of the young, and all imbued 

 with the strongest sense of industry, each individual labouring not for itself alone 

 but also for its fellows we may imagine that Sir Thomas More's description 

 of Utopia might have been applied with greater justice to such a community 

 than to any human society. 'But 'in Utopia, where every man has a right to 

 everything, they do all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full, 

 no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal dis- 

 tribution, so that no man is poor, nor in any necessity, and although no man has 

 anything, yet they are all rich ; for what can make a man so rich as to lead 

 a serene and cheerful life, free from anxieties, neither apprehending want him- 

 self, nor vexed with the endless complaints of his wife? He is not afraid of 

 the misery of his children, nor is he contriving how to raise a portion for his 

 daughters, but is secure in this, that both he and his wife, his children and grand- 

 children, to as many generations as he can fancy, will all live both plentifully 

 and happily.' ' -Thomas Belt, " The Naturalist in Nicaragua," 1874. 



The driver and legionary ants are the Huns and Tartars of the 

 insect world. Their vast armies of blind but exquisitely cooperating 

 and highly polymorphic workers, filled with an insatiable carnivorous 

 appetite and a longing for perennial migrations, accompanied by a 

 motley host of weird myrmecophilous camp-followers and concealing 

 the nuptials of their strange, fertile castes, and the rearing of their 

 young, in the inaccessible penetralia of the soil all suggest to the 

 observer who first comes upon these insects in some tropical thicket, 

 the existence of a subtle, relentless and uncanny agency, directing and 

 permeating all their activities. These marvellous insects have been 

 studied by many travellers for they are among the most conspicuous 

 creatures in the tropics but although our knowledge of them has been 

 notably increased within recent years, we still have much to learn con- 

 cerning their habits and development. 



By its latest and most careful student. Professor Emery, the sub- 

 family Dorylinse was taken in a broad sense to include not only the 

 drivers (Dorylii) of tropical Africa and Asia, and the legionary, or 

 visiting ants ( Ecitonii ) of the warmer portions of America, but also 



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