198 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



exterminated, fighting literally to the last ant. Where a colony is 

 unmolested it increases rapidly in population, and undertakes to lay 

 out roads : one of these, from two to three inches in width, has been 

 traced to a distance of 100 yards from the city. These ants are not 

 very carnivorous, nor do they damage the crops of neighboring farm- 

 ers. Persons who intrude upon the "pavement" are bitten with 

 great zeal, but otherwise the species may be regarded as harmless. 

 One creature alone they seem to tolerate on their " pavement " the 

 so-called small black " erratic " ant which, as Dr. Lincecum conject- 

 ures, may be of some use to them, and which is therefore allowed to 

 build its small cities in their immediate neighborhood. If it becomes 

 too numerous, however, it is got rid of, not by open war, but by a 

 course of systematic and yet apparently unintentional annoyance. 

 The agricultural ants suddenly find that it is necessary to raise their 

 pavement and enlarge the base of their city. In carrying out these 

 alterations they literally bury the nests of their neighbors under heaps 

 of the small pellets of soil thrown up by the prairie earth-worms, and 

 continue this process till the erratic ants in sheer despair remove to a 

 quieter spot. 



Concerning the government either of the agricultural ants or ot 

 other species, our knowledge is of a very negative character. The 

 queens, or rather mothers, of the city are indeed treated with great 

 attention, but their number is quite indefinite, and, unlike female 

 hive-bees, no jealousy exists between them. How their migrations, 

 their wars, their slave-hunts, are decided on, or even how the guards 

 on duty are appointed, and the visiting parties selected who go round 

 to inspect the works, and who sometimes insist on the destruction and 

 rebuilding of any badly-executed portion, we are utterly ignorant. 

 The outer manifestations of ant-life we have to some extent traced ; 

 but its inner springs, its directing and controlling powers, have eluded 

 our observation. 



It has been remarked, in the Quarterly Journal of Science, that 

 ants, unlike man, have solved the problem of the practical organiza- 

 tion of communism : this is literally true. In a formicary we can de- 

 tect no trace of private property ; the territory, the buildings, the 

 stores, the booty, exist equally for the benefit of all. Every ant has 

 its wants supplied, and each in turn is prepared to work or to fight 

 for the community as zealously as if the benefit of such toil and peril 

 were to accrue to itself alone. If the principle so common among 

 men that there is no harm in robbing or defrauding a municipal 

 body, or the nation at large, crops up in an ant-hill at all, it must evi- 

 dently be stamped out with an old-fashioned promptitude. But, to 

 understand why the ant has succeeded where man has failed, we must 

 turn to certain fundamental distinctions between human and ant so- 

 ciety ; or, perhaps, speaking more generally, between the associations 

 of vertebrate and those of annulose animals. A human tribe or na- 



