4 
first rank of scientific naturalists, but I must say, to my depraved 
taste, he is the most amusing, and this is what he says of Ants. 
“It seems to me that in the matter of intellect the ant must be 
a strangely overrated bird. During many summers now I have ~ 
watched him, when I ought to have been in better business, and I 
have not yet come across a living ant that seemed to have any more 
sense than a dead one. I refer to the ordinazy ant, of course; I 
have had no experience of those wonderful Swiss and African ones 
which vote, keep drilled armies, hold slaves, and dispute about | 
rcligion. Those particular ants may be all that the naturalist « 
paints them, but I am persuaded that the average ant is a sham. 
I admit his industry, of course; he is the hardest-working creature 
in the world —when anybody is looking—but his leather-headedness 
is the point I make against him. He goes out foraging, he makes 
a capture, and then what does he.do? Go home? No; he goes 
anywhere but home. He doesn’t know where home is. His home 
may be only three feet away; no matter, he can’t find it. He 
makes his capture, as I have said; it is generally something which 
can be of no sort of use to himself or anybody else; it is usually 
seven times bigger than it ought to be; he hunts out the awkwardest 
place to take hold of it; he lifts it bodily up in the air by main 
force, and starts—not towards home, but m the opposite direction ; 
not calmly and wisely, but with a frantic haste which is wasteful 
of his strength; he fetches up against a pebble, and, instead of — 
going around it, he climbs over it backwards, dragging his booty 
after him, tumbles down on the other side, jumps up in a passion, 
kicks the dust off his clothes, moistens his hands, grabs his property 
viciously, yanks it this way, then that, shoves it ahead of him a 
moment, turns tail, and lugs it after him another moment, gets 
madder and madder, then presently hoists it into the air and goes 
tearing away in an entirely new direction; comes to a weed; it 
never occurs to him to go aound it. No; he must climb it, and he 
does climb it, dragging his worthless property to the top—which is 
as bright a thing to do as it would be for me to carry a sack of flour 
from Heidelberg to Paris by way of Strasburg steeple, When he 
gets up there he finds that that is not the place; takes a cursory 
glance at the scenery, and either climbs down again or tumbles 
down, and starts off once more—as usual, in a new direction. At 
the end of half-an-hour he fetches up within six inches of the place 
he started from, and lays his burden down. Meantime, he has been 
over all the ground for two yards around, and climbed all the weeds 
and pebbles he came across. Now he wipes the sweat from his 
brow, strokes his limbs, and then marches aimlessly off, in as violent 
a hurry as ever. He traverses a good deal of zig-zag country, and 
by-and-by stumbles on his same booty again. He does not remem- 
