214 THE ANATOMY OF SCIENCE 



which cut off their wings after mating, this 

 might be a coincidence. But when we find that 

 termites and ants have a cultural life which is 

 almost identical ; that each has its royal, worker, 

 and soldier castes; that they have similar com- 

 plicated methods of deriving sustenance from 

 one another ; similar building habits, with elabo- 

 rately ventilated gardens in which are grown 

 and cultivated fungi unkno\Mi in the wild state, 

 and similar domesticated insects, how can we 

 harbor even the suggestion of coincidence? 



The parallel cited by Professor Wheeler is 

 not quite exact. Supposing that, when Australia 

 was discovered, we had found men and kanga- 

 roos building mud structures of the same archi- 

 tectural type, burying their dead in similar 

 mounds and with like ceremonials, would we 

 doubt that one of these species had exerted a 

 profound cultural influence upon the other .f^ 

 Now ants and termites often live together in a 

 happy symbiosis, and, indeed, there are certain 

 species of ants which have been found only in 

 the termitaria. These facts give us a feeling 

 akin to that experienced by Robinson Crusoe 

 when he found the footprints on his desert is- 

 land. I do not claim that imitation is the only 

 possible explanation of this curious phenome- 



