294 WHEELER— ANT LARV^. 



attention to a real problem, but one that belongs to the psychologist 

 and not to the biologist. I am quite willing to admit that there may 

 be in ants some feeble analogue of the parental feelings of man and 

 the highest animals, but as a biologist I am bound to seek and if 

 possible to find some ethological or physiological basis for the ant's 

 behavior toward her brood. Like other students of insects I have, 

 no doubt, often taken too much for granted and have unquestionably 

 committed the eighth deadly sin, called by the orthodox behaviorists 

 "anthropomorphism," not once but many times. By way of partial 

 penance I offer the following paper. 



I confess that I took the Swammerdamian conception for granted 

 till recently, while studying a collection of ants made in the Belgian 

 Congo for the American Museum of Natural History by my friend 

 Mr. H. O. Lang, I came upon some facts which seem to throw a flood 

 of light on the true meaning of the relations of ants to their brood. 

 These relations now appear to me so simple and unequivocal that I 

 find difficulty in understanding how they could have remained so 

 long unperceived, especially as a host of other facts had been in- 

 sistently pointing in the same direction. Our blindness seems to 

 have been due to regarding the adult ants as the only active factors 

 in the brood relationship. We supposed that the larvae, probably 

 because they are such sluggish, legless maggots, were merely the 

 inert and passive objects of the feeding, licking, transportation and 

 protection. One result of this assumption has been a general neglect 

 of the study of larval ants. Even their morphology has received 

 little attention. There are a few valuable papers by Berlese (1901), 

 Karawaiew (1896) and Perez (1902) on the metamorphosis of ants, 

 a single paper by Emery (1899) devoted to the external characters 

 of the larvae in a selected series of species and a number of scattered 

 descriptions and figures, published mainly for taxonomic purposes, 

 by myself and others. 



I regret that in the past I failed to study the larval ants more 

 closely and more continuously, especially as the meaning of some of 

 the unpublished records in my notebooks of 1899 and 1900 is clear 

 to me only now after the lapse of nearly twenty years. When I 

 took up my work at the University of Texas in the fall of 1899 ^s 

 a morphologist accustomed to well- furnished northern and European 



