680 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



lives of their community even against its own ignorance or care- 

 lessness. The prohibition of nests in the unsafe tree is a step 

 toward sanitary legislation. 



But there are other instances, instructive in their way, where 

 rooks interfere with members of their own community without 

 any apparent cause. White remarks (Selborne, Observations on 

 Various Parts of Nature), " If a pair offer to build on a single tree, 

 the nest is plundered and demolished at once." This has been 

 repeatedly observed by other naturalists where the trees were 

 quite unexceptionable in point of soundness. Surely these birds, 

 by their conduct in such cases, remind us of certain proceedings 

 of our own species. The rooks who persecute their fellow-citizens 

 who build on unauthorized trees are exactly like human beings 

 who claim a vested interest in their neighbors' speculative opin- 

 ions, who carry scientific questions to be decided upon in a po- 

 lice court, who dictate what may be discussed and what must 

 be ignored, and who seek to limit the methods of scientific re- 

 search. Hence the rooks are probably the first animals which 

 have evolved the vice of intolerance. Censorships, anti- vivisection 

 agitations, the imprisonment or execution of discoverers, may 

 thus be traced down the zoological series, and may be deemed the 

 ultimate transformation of the tabooed trees near the rookery. 

 In the rooks, as in the demos of ancient Athens, as G. H. Lewes 

 pointed out, it is curious that the first distinct manifestation of 

 intolerance should be in a republican community. Perhaps here, 

 as elsewhere, political freedom has to be bought at the price of 

 intellectual and moral bondage. 



The laws of ants are probably more complete and intricate than 

 those of the rookery. In the ant-hill the individual is completely 

 absorbed in and subjected to the interests of the community. 

 Cases which seem to indicate sanitary legislation have been ob- 

 served by Sir John Lubbock and others. Theft in communist 

 societies like those of ants can not occur, and needs, therefore, no 

 repression. Neglect of duty does occasionally take place, and it 

 has been seen to be promptly punished with death. Among 

 the agricultural ants of Texas prisoners l^ave 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 the offender into the underground 

 passages. Working ants (Mrs. L. Hutton, Journal of the Lin- 

 naean Society, vol. v, p. 217) have been seen to be killed by their 

 companions, apparently as the penalty of inaction. 



It is sometimes contended that the divisions of the human 

 species in general, or of any of its races and subraces, into nations, 

 tribes, and clans, is a phenomenon which has no parallel among the 

 lower animals. This view is a grave error. Almost every truly 



