156 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that have a measuring eye ! Is there, then, so wide a distance be- 

 tween this power of eye and the sense of symmetry, which the lowest 

 savage has who is sensitive to the harmony in the lines of a carving or 

 a tattooing ? Is it not simpler to suppose that the bee has something 

 of the same sensibility, rather than a sort of mathematical instinct, 

 such as is sometimes attributed to it? The whole cerebral physiology 

 of insects remains to be created. While we are no further advanced, 

 it is perhaps rash to allow much to their intellectual faculties, but it is 

 certainly unreasonable to degrade them too much. And, besides, 

 there is still in us that old sin of pride, on which Montaigne rallies us 

 so delicately, just with respect to the reason of animals. He under- 

 stood animals much better than Descartes ; he loves them, he plays 

 with his cat, and this intercourse enlightens him ; he speaks with 

 sound judgment of the too narrow share of intelligence allowed to 

 animals by man, while he himself" goes soaring in imagination beyond 

 the orbit of the moon." 



As to the legionary ants, the connection of the successive phenom- 

 ena serving to explain the appearance and development of their in- 

 stinct was far more difficult to conceive. We might well have despaired 

 of any reasonable deduction, had not certain facts, here and there in 

 Nature, come to our aid and put us on the right track, by showing us 

 elsewhere the same instinct, less developed, or modified in different 

 ways. These observations, coordinated by Darwin, have been like 

 flashes of light, and have allowed us to conceive the evolution of these 

 singular habits in a manner at least plausible. Thus, it is not uncom- 

 mon that certain ants, which do not usually take auxiliaries, carry away 

 to their hills nymphae that are found by chance in their neighborhood. 

 It is not unlikely that some of these nymphae may have happened to 

 come out, and may have performed the functions of their special in- 

 stinct in their adopted city. If, now, it is admitted that these services 

 may be of some use to the hill, then it will thrive better, and afterward 

 it may happen that the same chance captives and chance comings-out 

 of nymphaB may be repeated. At last, the habit will be formed 

 then the instinct will supervene, of carrying off stolen nympha?. At 

 the same time the presence of these strangers will almost necessarily 

 react upon the robber-ants. Their instincts and their organs will be 

 simultaneously modified, always upon the same principle, in the direc- 

 tion most favorable to the special duty that they perform in the com- 

 munity. From step to step, by a succession of scarcely-perceptible 

 modifications, accumulating through centuries and ages, we shall ar- 

 rive at races of legionaries as dependent on their comrades' labors as 

 the species studied by Peter Huber. 



Each instinct that we study displays itself to us, in a manner, under 

 an absolute form ; we never see it change ; therefore it is said to be 

 unchangeable. This is the illusion common to all phenomena that are 

 too slow for their progress to be measured by the life or the memory 



