CHAPTER XII 



ALIEN ASSOCIATES AND AFFINITIES IN ANT 



COMMUNES 



THAT "no man liveth to himself is an aphorism 

 not to be questioned in human communes. That 

 no community lives to itself is equally true. And this 

 applies to ants. Their societies are established in the 

 vicinage or in the midst of numberless creatures, most 

 of them, like themselves, free citizens of that wild life 

 which nature has organized and maintains in the cul- 

 tivated parks and fields of men no less than in a wilder- 

 ness. He deludes himself who thinks that he ever is 

 delivered from the environment of wild things. Of the 

 large and grosser sorts, it may be; but civilization never 

 will tame or exterminate the innumerable hosts of minor 

 creatures, seemingly as wild now as in the primitive 

 Eden, that inhabit our day-world and, even more, our 

 night-life. 



The ants are examples of this. They find and keep 

 a foothold everywhere. I have surprised immense com- 

 munities in the heart of great cities. I have shown an 

 American farmer, who boasted in the tilth of his acres- 

 under the plough since the first English settlements- 

 that he could scarcely put down a foot in a walk through 

 a field without placing it upon a little commune of 

 meadow ants. 



These cases do not stand alone. A naturalist would 



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