260 HUBER OF THE ANTS. 
What a joy, what a triumph for the partisans of slavery, for all the 
friends of evil! Hell and tyranny, laugh ye, and make merry! A 
black spot is revealed in the brightness of Nature. 
I had flung aside Huber, and no book had ever seemed to me more 
hateful. Pardon, illustrious observer! your grandfather and your 
father had enraptured and charmed me. The first of the clan—Huber, 
the great historian of the bees—has inspired with new warmth the 
religion of man, and lifted up his heart. But Huber of the ants has 
broken mine. 
{t was, nevertheless, a duty to resume my perusal of his work, and 
examine it more attentively. An immoral, a Machiavellian, and a per- 
verse insect 1s worthy of investigation. 
But, in the first place, let us make a distinction. A portion of these 
pretended slaves may only be cattle. 
It is enough to look at the ants, thin to an excess, brilliant, and 
varnished, to conclude that they are the driest and most parched of 
beings. Their singular acridity has been established by chemical re- 
searches, and science has contrived to extract the mordant formic acid 
from their bodies. Sometimes, when they are in peril, they hurl it at 
their enemies like a venom. Not a few species employ it in drying, 
blackening, and almost burning the trees where they establish their 
abodes. Is not a substance so corrosive for others equally dangerous to 
themselves? I should be tempted to think so, and to this extreme 
acridity should attribute their greediness for honey and other lubricat- 
ing substances. I submit my hypothesis to the consideration of the 
scientific. 
The ants of Mexico, in a specially favoured climate, have two classes 
of workmen,—one charged with the duty of seeking provisions; the 
other, inactive and sedentary, entrusted with the work of elaborating 
them, and making out of them a kind of honey for the common nourish- 
ment. 
The ants of our temperate climates, for the most part incapable of 
making honey, satisfy their imperative need of it by licking the 
honey-dew found upon certain grubs, which, without labour, by the 
mere fact of their organization, extract saccharine juices from all species 
