aoo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



merits, and devoted to the community alone. To attempt, without the 

 existence of such an order, to introduce the social arrangements of the 

 ant i. e., communism among mankind is as futile and as irrational 

 as the endeavor to fly without wings : the very primary conditions for 

 success are wanting. 



It may not be amiss to examine a little further in the same direc- 

 tion. Among men there is a great diversity both in intellect and in 

 energy. The more highly-endowed individual, if he does not leave his 

 children in a better position, materially speaking, is likely to transmit 

 to them his own personal superiority. In this manner the theoretical 

 equality assumed as one of the bases of communism is in practice an- 

 nihilated. Among ants nothing of this kind can prevail. The workers 

 and the fighters are sexless. If any individual is superior to its fel- 

 lows in strength or in intelligence and we have every reason to be- 

 lieve that such must be the case it has no posterity to whom its 

 acquisitions could be bequeathed or its personal superiority handed 

 down. Hence the formation of an aristocracy is impossible, and what- 

 ever benefit may result from the labors of such an exceptional individ- 

 ual flows to the entire community. In the converse manner the forma- 

 tion of a pariah, a criminal, or a pauper class, is frustrated, and the 

 public is not burdened with useless or dangerous existences. 



It is indisputable that this arrangement, joined to the brief term 

 of inse.ct-life, must greatly retard the progress of the ant in civiliza- 

 tion. It has been remarked that were human life longer our develop- 

 ment in knowledge and in the arts would be much more rapid. Take 

 our present condition : by the time a man has completed his education, 

 general and special has fully developed his own mental faculties and 

 mastered the position of the subject he has selected he will be rarely 

 less than five-and-twenty years of age. By the time he is fifty, as a 

 rule, his power of origination begins to decline, and the remainder of 

 his life is spent more in completing and rounding ofl* the work of his 

 younger days than in making fresh inroads into the unknown. Did 

 our full vigor of intellect extend over a century, instead of over a 

 fourth of that duration, we should undoubtedly effect much more. 

 On the other hand, a shortening of our time of activity would have a 

 powerfully retarding effect on the career of discovery and invention. 

 Can we, then, wonder if the short-lived ant and bee sometimes appear 

 to us stationary in their civilization ? But this very brevity of the 

 career of each individual acts decidedly in favor of the preservation 

 of social equality. If either ant or man is disposed to rise or to fall, 

 then the shorter the time during which such rise or fall is possible the 

 better will the uniform level of society be preserved. To prevent mis- 

 understanding we must remark that castes with a corresponding dif- 

 ference of duties, and, according to some authorities, with a diversity 

 of honor also, do occur in the ant-hill ; but within each caste all are 

 on an exactly equal footing. 



