356 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ants. Of the honey-secreting Aphides, and Cocci that serve them as 

 milch-kine, some have large herds, some small ones, while others have 

 none at all, and if they encounter an Aphis straightway kill and eat 

 it. Is it not more probable that the ants first sought Aphides, like 

 other insects, for this very purpose, but gradually discovered a way 

 to turn them to better account, than that a flock of Aphides -was, by 

 some wonderful coincidence or interposition, placed within the reach 

 of the first ant-hill ? 



It would, therefore, in our opinion, be exceedingly imprudent to 

 declare that ant-civilization has not advanced, may not now be ad- 

 vancing, and may be destined to take yet further steps in the future, 

 especially if large and fruitful portions of the globe are long allowed 

 to remain in an uncultivated or semi-cultivated state. But such ad- 

 vances must necessarily be slow, as in all cases where there are no 

 means of recording the experience of one generation for the benefit 

 of the succeeding, and where what among mankind would be known 

 as oral intercourse is limited by shortness of life. What direction 

 these future advances may take, it is as difficult to indicate as to fore- 

 tell the discoveries and inventions to be made by man during the next 

 century. But we may safely say that they will not consist in the in- 

 troduction of tools or weapons or machinery. Were man, in propor- 

 tion to his size, about twenty times as strong as he is at present 

 were he provided by Nature with a pair of forceps, playing laterally, 

 and capable of being used for felling trees, for excavating the ground, 

 or for cutting off the heads of his enemies he would scarcely have 

 been a tool-inventing and tool-using animal. A being which, like the 

 Sauba ants of Brazil, can construct a tunnel underneath the bed of a 

 river as wide as the Thames at London Bridge, is in no need of 

 shovels, pickaxes, or barrows. 



That ants, in tropical climates, occasion much loss and annoyance 

 to man is indisputable ; yet the annihilation of all kinds of ants, were 

 such a measure practicable, would scarcely be prudent. Here, as 

 elsew T here, the rule holds good that small carnivora are to be cher- 

 ished, and small herbivora and omnivora destroyed. The carnivorous 

 ants, such as the Ecitons, are invaluable, from the myriads of cock- 

 roaches, scorpions, centipedes, venomous spiders, grasshoppers, and 

 even rats and mice, that they destroy. They keep down serpents, 

 also, by devouring their eggs. The plant-eaters, on the contrary, and 

 especially the leaf-cutters, are an unalloyed evil, and their destruction 

 ought to be attempted in a much more systematic way than what 

 takes place at present. Nor can the " cattle-keeping " ants be toler- 

 ated. Even though they may not, in their own persons, attack the 

 fruits and the leaves of useful trees, they compass injury to the latter 

 by cherishing and defending swarms of such pernicious vermin as the 

 Aphides of temperate regions and the scale-insects and tree-hoppers 

 of warmer climates. All these live by sucking the juices of plants, 



