310 WILLIAM MORTON WHEELER 
cellular and personal activities with which we are constantly 
dealing. This failure, moreover, is largely responsible for our 
fear of the psychological and the metaphysical, a fear which be- 
comes the more ludicrous from the fact that even our so-called 
‘exact’ sciences smell to heaven with the rankest kind of material- 
istic metaphysics. 
Leaving these generalities for the present, permit me to present 
the evidence for the contention that the animal colony is a true 
organism andnot merely theanalogueof the person. To make this 
evidence as concrete as possible I shall take the ant-colony asa 
paradigm and ask you to accept my statement that the colonies 
of the termites, social bees and wasps, which the limited time at 
my disposal does not permit to consider, will be found to offer the 
same and in some cases even more satisfactory data. I select the 
ant-colony not only because I am more familiar with its activities, 
but because it is much more interesting than that of the polyps, 
more typical and less specialized than that of the honey bee, less 
generalized than that of the wasps and bumble-bees, and has been 
much more thoroughly investigated than the colonies of the sting- 
less bees and the termites. 
The most general organismal character of the ant-colony is its 
individuality. Like the cell or the person, it behaves as a unitary 
whole, maintaining its identity in space, resisting dissolution and, 
as a general rule, any fusion with other colonies of the same or 
alien species. This resistance is very strongly manifested in the 
fierce defensive and offensive codperation of the colonial personnel. 
Moreover, every ant-colony has its own peculiar idiosyncrasies 
of composition and behavior. This is most clearly seen in the 
character of the nest, which bears about the same relation to the 
colony that the shell bears to the individual Foraminifer or mol- 
lusc. The nest is a unitary structure, built on a definite but 
plastic design and through the codperation of a number of persons. 
It not only reflects the idiosyncrasies of these persons individually 
and as a whole, but it often has a most interesting adaptive growth 
and orientation which may be regarded as a kind of tropism. In 
many species the nest mounds, which are used as incubators of the 
brood and as sun-parlors for the adult ants, are constructed in 
