CHAPTER VI 



AGRICULTURAL ANTS 



FROM remote antiquity men have believed that ants 

 are harvesters of grain. Thus much, at least, of 

 the farmer cult they were thought to possess. On few 

 matters of natural history is ancient literature so ac- 

 cordant. Virgil, in his lEneid, compares the departing 

 Trojans to swarms of harvesting ants invading fields of 

 yellow grain. 



Early English writers accepted this fact solely on the 

 testimony of antiquity. Milton's lines will be recalled 

 in the matchless account of the creation of living things, 

 placed in the mouth of Raphael. The Angel, with zoo- 

 logical accuracy, places the Hymenoptera at the head of 

 the orders of insects : 



" First crept 

 The parsimonious emmet, provident 

 Of future, in small room large heart enclosed; 

 Pattern of just equality perhaps 

 Hereafter, joined in her popular tribes 

 Of commonalty." 



— Paradise Lost, Book VII., 1. 484 sqq. 



Milton doubtless wrote better than he could have known 

 at that period, when he found in ants a pattern of a 

 just, equal, and provident society. 



Thus the record ran without break until ■ the close of 



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