PHILOSOPHIC ANTS 183 



He said it. But Truth stirred within him, and under 

 his breath he muttered "Eppur si muove . . ." This 

 was overheard, and he was condemned (loneliness be- 

 ing much hated and dreaded by ants) to a solitary 

 banishment. 



Later philosophers, however, by using this same 

 pendulum method, were enabled to fmd that the 

 movements of sap in plants differed in rate accord- 

 ing to the length of day, and later discovered that 

 the expansion of water in hollow stems also followed 

 these changes. By devising machines for registering 

 these movements, they were enabled to prophesy with 

 considerable success the amount of work to be got 

 through on a given day, and so to render great aid to 

 the smooth working of the body politic. Thus, grad- 

 ually, the old ideas fell into desuetude among the 

 educated classes — which, however, did not prevent 

 the common people from remaining less than half- 

 convinced and from regarding the men of science with 

 suspicion and disapproval. 



******* 



We happen to be warm-blooded — to have had the 

 particular problem faced by our philosophic ants 

 solved for us during the passage of evolutionary 

 time, not by any taking of thought on our part or 

 on the part of our ancestors, but by the casual proc- 

 esses of variation and natural selection. But a suc- 

 cession of similar problems presses upon us. Rela- 



