40 



THE PRACTICAL ENTOMOLOGIST. 



have been uioie than once deceived, by having a 

 clipped and disguised eagle pitted against a genu- 

 ine game-cock; but you cannot deceive an ant into 

 mistaking a Grain Plant-louse for an individual of 

 the ordinary houey-produciug- species. Call it in- 

 stinct, or inherited experience, or acquired experi- 

 ence, or acute powers of sensation, or reason, or 

 what you will, the fact is indisputable, that my 

 friends, the poor despised insects, often know more 

 than such an exalted and highly-educated being as 

 Man. Of the thirty millions of men that inhabit 

 the United States, probably not a thousand persons 

 could distinguish a Grain Plant-louse from an Ap- 

 ple-tree Plant-louse, when the two were placed side 

 by side. Of the billions upon billions of ants that 

 inhabit the same country, probably not a single in- 

 dividual would be puzzled to tell the difiFerence be- 

 tween the two. Take any philosopher in Christen- 

 dom, blind-fold him, and set him down in a large 

 and dense forest five miles away from his own house, 

 and he will likely enough starve before he finds his 

 way home without assistance. Put a common honey- 

 bee in a close box, and carry it to the same forest 

 five miles from its hive, and after it has gorged it- 

 self with honey it will fly so straight home, that its 

 path has passed into a proverb and is known as a 

 "bee-line." And yet the ant and the bee are com- 

 monly thought, by the high and the low vulgar, to 

 be beneath the notice of any grown man ! 



I have dwelt the longer upon what might be po- 

 etically called " The loves of the Ants and the 

 Plant-lice," because, although the whole thing has 

 been perfectly well understood by Naturalists for 

 the last eentuiy, yet unscientific persons are per- 

 petually mistaking the effect for the cause, and 

 making war upon the ants, which do them no harm 

 whatever, instead of upon the Plant-lice, which are 

 the real authors of the mischief, but which from 

 their extreme minuteness are entirely overlooked, 

 or perhaps supposed by some to be young and im- 

 mature ants. They might just as well, because a 

 herd of cows had broken into their garden and 

 trampled down and eaten up their flowers, pursue 

 the inoffensive milk-maids with fire and sword. 

 You can scarcely take up an Agricultural Journal, 

 without listening to the complaints of some indig- 

 nant correspondent, that the ants have ruined his 

 rose-bushes, or his apple-trees, or his verbenas, or 

 his currant-bushes; that he has tried to dig them 

 out, and tried to burn them out, and tried to scald 

 them out; but that the more he digs and the more 

 he burns and the more he scalds, the more they 

 seem to increase and multiply. No wonder. He 

 has been barking up the wrong tree. He has mis- 

 taken an inoffensive neutral for a bitter enemy. He 

 has committed the common error of confounding the 

 After with the Because — the post, quod with the 

 propter quod — and jumped to the conclusion that 

 because the Ants swarm on the infested plants, 

 therefore it must necessarily be the Ants that do 

 all the mischief there. 



It is certainly true that in houses certain species 

 of Ants are sometimes very troublesome and very 

 destructive, from their habit of searching out every- 



thing that is of a sugary nature, to- carry off as food 

 for their young larva. In nicely kept gardens also, 

 they sometimes raise unsightly little^ mounds of 

 earth, in the construction of their underground ha- 

 bitations. Hut- otherwise they are entirely harm- 

 less, and may even be considered as beneficial, from 

 their practice of carrying off to their nests dead or 

 wounded or sick insects, as food for their young 

 larvaj. Often have I watched an ant dragging 

 along, through the tangled herbage, a wounded 

 caterpillar four or five times as large as itself, and 

 been struck with admiration at the persevering 

 manner in which it would toil under the unwieldy 

 burden, till some neighbor at last would come to its 

 assistance. Living and vigorous and healthy in- 

 sects I do not believe that they often attempt to 

 prey upon; at least such is my experience with the 

 Ants of this country, though certain exotic species 

 are said to do so. But woe to the wounded ! woe 

 to the sick and helpless ! wee to the crippled ! Them 

 the Black Ant, them the Bed Ant, them the Yel- 

 low Ant, them the great host of Brown Ants in- 

 stinctively mark as their prey. Them they seize by 

 the wing, or the leg, or the head, or any other part 

 that comes handiest, and haul them away forthwith 

 to death and destruction. To fastidious persons 

 perhaps, who have just wiped their own lips after 

 swallowing a few dozen raw oysters in the agonies 

 of death, this may seem cruel and ungenerous and 

 ferocious behavior. But it is part and parcel of the 

 great law of Nature — " Kill and be killed, eat and be 

 eaten. Let the strong and healthy live. Let the 

 sick and the weak and the wounded die and cease 

 to cumber the earth." Only by the unshrinking 

 enforcement of such stern laws as these, can Nature 

 attain what appears to be her chief object in the 

 works of the Creation — the greatest happiness of 

 the greatest possible number of individuals.* 



It has commonly been contended that, but for 

 the careful attendance and watchful vigilance of 

 the Ants, Plant-lice could not thrive and multiply 

 at the prodigious rate at which they commonly do. 

 But the case of the Grain Plant-louse seems to con- 

 tradict this theory. No species o{ Aphis multiplies 

 with more fearful rapidity, and yet it is entirely 

 unattended by Ants, as we learn from Dr. Fitch. 



* According to Mr. Glover, the Southern Army 'Worm 

 or Grass Caterpillar nf the South (Laphryrjma macra) was 

 attacked in Georgia by certain ants, as often as it at- 

 tempted to cross a broad and sandy carriage-road, pass- 

 ing through the middle of the grass field that it inhabit- 

 ed, in search of better food. {Rep. Agr. Bureau, Oct. 1S66, 

 p. 377.) But this is a very different thing from its being 

 attacked by those ants while it remained in its proper 

 situation — on the grass. The half-wild dogs in Constan- 

 tinople have each of them their regular districts; and so 

 long as they keep within their own districts, they are not 

 molested by other dogs. But whenever one is driven by 

 hunger to stray into a strange district, he is immediately 

 torn to pieces by the dogs that belong to that district. So, 

 in a kennel of hounds, if a hound is asleep on a bench 

 and accidentally falls off, the other hounds will tear him 

 to pieces. The general principal seems to be. that any 

 unusual action, indicating distress, want or disease, au- 

 thorizes capital punishment. Every farmer's wife knows 

 that a sick hen or sick hog is often worried and killed by 

 its companions; and Shakspeare has moralized on the 

 fact, that a wounded deer it often gored to death by thft 

 rest of the herd. 



