398 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



queenloss nests were ahvays ruthlessly killed, even though -in one ease 

 Sir John exhibited the queen for three days to the ant-democracy in a 

 wire cage which protected her from them, in order to accustom them 

 to the sight of royalty. The moment the protecting wire was re- 

 moved, the queen was attacked and slain, just as if she had been an 

 ordinary alien. Sir John, however, was occasionally able, by the help 

 of a little intrigue of the Marshal MacMahon kind, but more success- 

 ful to obtain a throne for a wandering queen. The way he managed 

 was this : He took a few ants from their nest, and put them, in that 

 disorganized state, with a strange queen. The ants were then in a tim- 

 orous and diffident mood. They had no fixed institutions to fall back 

 upon. They felt wanderers in the world. And, feeling this, they did 

 not attack the queen, but rather regarded her as the nucleus of a pos- 

 sible organization. By thus gradually adding a few ants at a time to 

 a disorganized mob which had accepted the queen as the starting-point 

 for a new polity, " I succeeded," says Sir John Lubbock, " in securing 

 the throne for her." But this success speaks as much for the conserva- 

 tism of the ants as the former unanimous rejection of the queen by an 

 organized community. They repudiated a queen when they knew 

 that their institutions were in working order without her. They ac- 

 cepted her, when they felt at sea and in peril of anarchy, as the germ 

 of a new system. It was a timid conservatism which dictated their 

 policy in each case. In the former, they rejected with horror the 

 prospect of a change of constitution ; in the latter, they accepted, not, 

 perhaps, without eagerness, the prospect of a more rapid political de- 

 velopment than, without any ready-made leader, they could have 

 counted upon. For the ants, then, the throne was, as M. Thiers said 

 of a republic, under dissimilar circumstances, the constitution " which 

 divided them least." 



And it is to be inferred, we think, that the languid skepticism 

 which is one of the commonest causes or effects it is difficult to say 

 which of that intense timidity which is so often connected with con- 

 servatism, affects these wonderful little creatures also. Sir John shows 

 us most satisfactorily that the ants understand each other that when 

 an ant goes back from a bit of food which she is unable by her own 

 strength to stir, she can and does communicate in some way to her 

 fellow-ants the need of help. They clearly understand her message, 

 and they prepare to assist her ; but they have, it appears, no real con- 

 fidence in her information. What they see with their own eyes fills 

 them with the utmost eagerness, but what they learn from others they 

 do not more than half believe. They usually go with the messenger, 

 but they go without any real elan, without any of that earnestness 

 which they display after getting personal experience of the existence 

 of the store of food. After that they are all urgency. After that 

 they outrun their fellows, and can not reach the store of provisions too 

 soon. But on the hearing of the ear they act with the utmost languor. 



