LIFE; BODY AND MIND 213 



wild state, you would probably say it is man; 

 but man has been doing some of these things 

 onl}^ a very few thousand years, while these 

 same arts have been practiced for a million 

 years by a lowly insect whose nearest relatives 

 are the book louse and the cockroach. I refer to 

 the termites, which are sometimes called white 

 ants because of their remarkable resemblance 

 in habits to the ant family. Yet the termites and 

 the ants come at the very opposite ends of the 

 classification of insects. 



The resemblance is so extraordinary that 

 Professor Wheeler^ writes, "it is as if we had 

 found, when Australia was first explored, the 

 kangaroos and opossums enjoying a social or- 

 ganization like that of man." To ignore such a 

 remarkable phenomenon is unscientific, to call 

 it a coincidence is antiscientific. To apply re- 

 peatedly and against all principles of chance 

 the hypothesis of coincidence is the very nega- 

 tion of science. If we had observed merely that 

 the termites have a social organization, and that 

 the group of insects to which ants, bees and 

 wasps belong also have a social organization, it 

 would be interesting. If it were observed that 

 the termites and the ants are the only insects 



6 W. M. Wheeler, Social Life among the Insects. 



