LUBBOCK ON INSECT CONSERVATISM. 397 



suggestions not fitting easily into the established grooves. The ant, it 

 is evident, does not, like Lord Beaconsfield, believe mainly in race, but, 

 on the contrary, like the English squire, " acred up to his lips, consoled 

 up to his chin," believes chiefly in family, and, we must add, has shown 

 much more amazing instincts than any English squire in discriminating 

 the progeny of one group of families from the progeny of another. 

 That a strange ant, though of the same species, put into any nest, will 

 be at once attacked and killed. Sir John Lubbock has proved again and 

 again. Like the English rustic who, on assuring himself that a man is 

 a stranger to the district, immediately proposes to " 'eave 'alf a brick 

 at him," the ants pay no regard to species at all, if they find an ant 

 who can not trace his descent to their own nest intruding upon it. 

 They make a principle of hostility to aliens, drawing no distinction 

 between aliens of their own species and aliens of another species. But 

 the remarkable thing appears to be their special instinct for identifying 

 the descendants of their own tribe. Sir John Lubbock separated into 

 two parts, in February, 1879, a nest of ants which contained two 

 queens, giving about the same number of ants and one queen to each. 

 In February the nest contains neither young nor eggs, so that the di- 

 vision was made before the earliest stage of being for the next genera- 

 tion began. In April both queens began to lay eggs. In July, Sir 

 John Lubbock took a lot of pupse from each division, and placed each 

 lot on a separate glass, with attendants from the same division of the 

 nest. At the end of August he took four previously marked ants from 

 the pupse bred in one division and put them into the second division, 

 and one previously marked ant from the pupae bred in the second divi- 

 sion and put it into the first ; in both cases the ants, which could never 

 have been seen in any stage of their life by any of the ants in that 

 division, were welcomed as friends, cleared of Sir John's paint, and 

 accepted as members of the family. The same thing happened again 

 and again. But whenever a stranger was introduced after the same 

 fashion, it was immediately attacked and destroyed. This confirmed 

 still moi'e remarkably a series of less crucial erperiments formerly 

 made by Sir John Lubbock on the same subject. By some inscrutable 

 sense or other, the ants, it is clear, know the descendants at least in 

 the first degree of those which have once belonged to their own nest, 

 even though they were neither born nor thought of when their parents 

 left the nest. So much for the profound instinct of consanguinity in 

 the ant, as well as for the unconquerable hostility they show to those 

 ants who are not connected with them, within recognizable degrees at 

 least, by blood. 



But now as to the intense political conservatism which this bigoted 

 sort of family feeling produces. Sir John Lubbock has discovered, it 

 appears, that once let an ants' nest get accustomed to living without a 

 queen once let it organize democratic institutions and nothing will 

 induce it to admit a queen for the future. Queens introduced into 



