14 Anfs in Relation to Floxvers. [Sess. 



understand as reason is quite another matter. Instinct of a 

 very high order it undoubtedly is. But whether this instinct 

 can be regarded in any other light than the almost necessary 

 outcome of social habits which have prevailed through very 

 long periods of time is very much open to question. There 

 are many facts connected with Ants which seem to me to 

 entitle them to claim a very high antiquity — higher, indeed, 

 in some cases, than that of the continents in which they 

 occur. If I am correct in holding this opinion that the 

 instincts of these and other Social Hymenoptera is the out- 

 come of an ancestral history whose commencement dates far 

 back in the Past, many of the difficulties which confront us 

 when we realise their utter want of resource on such occasions 

 as when they are placed under conditions to which their 

 ancestors have not grown accustomed will at once vanish. In 

 the course of an infinite number of generations their ancestors 

 have gradually acquired the habit of dealing successfully with 

 particular cases of difficulty, and the habit of doing so has 

 been so long transmitted that it has become practically as 

 much fixed as their morphological peculiarities in each case. 

 But when Ants find themselves placed under conditions which 

 have seldom or never occurred in any part of their ancestral 

 history, they are just as mucin at a loss to meet the difficulties 

 of the case as any other animals on the same level in the scale 

 of creation would be. I want to suggest that much of the 

 sagacity of Ants in general is due to the fact that there has 

 been going on, for a very long time, a persistent, but close, con- 

 test between Ants on the one hand and Plants on the other, and 

 that the struggle has left its mark upon both. The nature of 

 the contest may be gathered from the statements which follow. 

 Ants, like all other animals, need food of some kind. In 

 some respects they may be said to be omnivorous, as there is 

 hardly anything of either animal or vegetable origin that one 

 kind of Ant or another does not eat. But they all show a 

 decided preference for food of a saccharine nature. Some 

 individuals, told off for particular kinds of duty which pre- 

 cludes their preparing their own meals, are fed by other Ants 

 (Worker-Ants always being meant, vmless otherwise stated) 

 with a kind of nectar, which they sip from the lips of the 

 Hebe who is deputed to act in that capacity. Whether the 



