Packard.] THE SOCIAL LIFE OF INSECTS. 327 



mail's account of their doings when the roj'al chamber is 

 finall}' laid bare. He sa3^s tliat "these faithful subjects 

 never abandon their charge even in the last distress ; for 

 whenever I took out the royal chamber, and as I often did, 

 preserved it for some time in a large glass bowl, all the 

 attendants continued running in one direction around the 

 king and queen with the utmost solicitude, some of them 

 stopping in every circuit at the head of the latter, as if to 

 give her something. When Ihc}^ came to the extremity of 

 the abdomen they took the eggs from her, and carried them 

 awaj', and piled them carefully together in some part of the 

 chamber, or in the bowl under or behind any pieces of broken 

 clay \Yhich lay most convenient for the purpose." 



It is the reserve mental power shown by these insects in 

 rising to extraordinary occasions such as these that excites 

 our astonishment. "Blind instinct" will serve for the per- 

 formance of the most ordinary routine work of tlieir social 

 life, but even instinct is often at fault, and unless there is 

 sometliing in these beings akin to reasoning powers, one is 

 at a loss to account for their readiness in dealing with unex- 

 pected emergencies, as seen in their manner of repairing 

 their houses. 



IIow insects came to be social is difficult to conjecture. 

 The whole course of nature is opposed to concentrated effort 

 on the part of animals. Nature from their birth scatters 

 them. The few species of insects which are social are the 

 exceptions to the rule, as the ancient civilizations of As- 

 syria, p]gypt, and America are phenomena, exceptions to 

 the isolated tribes and families of savage peoples existing 

 around them. The whole course of human progress tends 

 to show that man at first lived in scattered families, which 

 gradually assembled in scanty tril)es, drawn together for 

 mutual protection. At first the fact tliat colonies of insects 

 exist so highly differentiated as the white ants, seems one of 

 the most potent arguments against the development hypoth- 



7 



