OUR SIX-FOOTED RIVALS. 353 



Facts are not wanting which show that the social organization of 

 ants takes cognizance of sanitary matters. In Australia they have 

 been known to bury their dead, not without some degree of formality ' 

 according to their caste. In experimental formicaries in this country, 

 ants have been observed to throw the bodies of their dead companions 

 into the water surrounding their dwellings. In the nests of almost all 

 species great care is taken to preserve cleanliness. The agricultural 

 ant of Texas removes any offensive matter placed near its city, and 

 will even take the trouble to carry away the droppings of cattle that 

 have fallen on its cleared ground. Any dung-rolling beetle which 

 brings its ball of ordure within these sacred precincts is at once at- 

 tacked and put to death, and the nuisance is quickly cut to pieces and 

 carried to a distance. 



Nor are laws on other matters wanting. Ants who have, from 

 some unknown cause, refused to work have been observed to be put 

 to death. Among the agricultural ants, prisoners have been known 

 to be brought in by a fellow-citizen and handed over in a very rough 

 manner to the guards, who are always on duty on the level ground 

 before the city, and who carry off the offender into the underground 

 passages. What is his after-fate is not known. It is almost needless 

 to point out that even the faintest rudiment of law proves the exist- 

 ence of some notions of right and wrong, as well as of a power of 

 communication which must go into minute details. 



We have now to deal with the great question whether the civiliza- 

 tion of ants, like that of man, has been gradually and slowly devel- 

 oped by the accumulation of experience, or whether as the believers 

 in the fixity of habits and instincts still contend it is primordial, co- 

 existent with the species in all the details which we now observe. 

 Direct historical evidence is here yet more difficult to obtain than as 

 concerns animal structure. We smile, with just reason, at the French 

 savants of the Egyptian Expedition, who imagined that, by the study 

 of the animal-mummies there preserved, they might gain some light 

 on, or rather find some argument against, the mutation of species. 

 At the same time, we readily admit that, could we find a complete 

 series of skeletons, anatomical preparations, or even photographs of 

 the best-known animals, made at intervals of a century, and extending 

 backward for say a hundred thousand years, the doctrine of evolution 

 would be brought to a crucial test. But, concerning the former 

 habits and instincts of animals, correct information is far more diffi- 

 cult to obtain. The " stone-book " is silent or oracularly vague. Even 

 if we had written documents left us by some naturalist of the Miocene 

 ages if we can suppose such a being to have existed what security 

 should we have for the accuracy and the completeness of his re- 

 searches ? 



To meet this difficulty an attempt, remarkable for its subtile in- 



1 Journal of Linncean Society, vol. v., p. 217. 

 vol. xii. 23 



