Examination of Some Objections. 67 



has arbitrarily shifted his own moral concepts into the 

 brain of the animal. 



It is precisely the same with the police ants whose 

 aid is said to have been invoked against the "thief." 

 When an ant draws the sensitive attention of her com- 

 panions to herself by rapidly tapping them with her 

 feelers, so that they follow her and take part in a 

 certain undertaking, her mode of procedure cannot be 

 compared to a human appeal for help, much less to a 

 summons af the police. The whole interpretation is 

 arbitrary and an obvious humanization of the brute. 



But apart from the above-mentioned anthropomor- 

 phisms, the whole observation was misinterpreted by 

 the observer. No expert in ant life will question this 

 statement. For it is simply unheard of, and contradicts 

 the observations of all ant-biologists, as Huber, Forel, 

 Lubbock, Andre, McCook, Moggridge, Adlerz, Janet, 

 etc., that any single ant should try to hide a part of her 

 booty and deprive other members of the colony in order 

 to gratify her own gluttony. If it be allowed to draw 

 general conclusions from facts and no naturalist will 

 dispute such a legitimate deduction we can boldly state, 

 that any similar egotistic action on the part of an ant 

 is a physical impossibility; it contradicts a law of 

 nature. 



But the case is still more hopeless, because it hap- 

 pened to be a hill ant (Formica rufa) which was 

 branded as a "thief." This very species is distinguished 

 for its social traits, and the single individual is absorbed 

 in the community in a far higher degree than is the case 

 with ants of any other species, even as a slave in strange 

 colonies. In an observation nest of the ravenous Red 



