N. S. ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



A FEW NOTES ON ANT HISTORY AND HABITS. 



By 

 Rev. H. J. Fraser. 



I shall not trouble you with an apology for my little study, 

 since I am here on your own invitation; but I think I ought to 

 say a personal word or two. I am not a science student, and. 

 I have the amateur's abhorrence of scientific terms, but I have 

 for some years been fascinated by two lines of study; the one 

 concerned with those branches of inquiry which take us out into 

 vast spaces and incalculable stretches of time, such as Astron- 

 omy and Geology; the other, with the life habits of the little 

 folk that creep about under our all too heedless feet. 



I need not say to you, whose presence here indicates your 

 interest, that there is a very wonderful world lying about our 

 doors, a world full of little beings with their loves and hates, 

 their ecstasies and tragedies, their wonderful skill in work, and 

 their approaches, to say the least, to human intelligence and 

 imagination. 



Among these, the subject of this little paper, the ant, ranks 

 very high, so high that for my part I must confess that she com- 

 mands my most sincere and rapturous admiration, although 

 she is not always my friend. In some respects I admit at 

 once that she is my superior, and it does me good to know that 

 great and mighty as I am, there are others, and some of them 

 are most humiliatingly small. 



The ant family outnumbers by far all other terrestrial ani- 

 mals, exists in a great range of variety, and inhabits all sorts 

 of geographical regions, from Arctic to Tropic, from dampest 

 forest to driest desert, and from the top timberline of the 

 highest mountains to the sand dune on the lip of the ocean. 

 Their colonies, when favorably located, are remarkably stable, 

 often outlasting a human generation, while the individual has 

 been known to attain the age of fourteen years, a veritable 

 Methuselah in the insect world. 



Some striking, if apparently fanciful analogies to the hu- 

 man race, have long been noted. As human civilization is 

 marked off in stages, the hunting, pastoral, and agricultural, 

 preceding in order of time the present industrial and commercial 



