Introduction. 3 



humanizing tendencies of modern times, states in the 

 introduction to his book, "Ants, Wasps and Bees," 

 that ants rank next to man in the scale of intelHgence, 

 and that in psychic faculties they approach nearer to 

 man than the Anthropoid apes even. George Romanes 

 in the sixth edition of his book, ''Animal Intelligence" 

 (1895), devotes more than one hundred pages to ants, 

 and thus indicates the great importance he ascribes 

 to their psychic qualities. 



Prior to Lubbock's v^ork on ants, another prom- 

 inent investigator of ant life, Dr. Augustus Forel, in 

 his "Fourmis de la Suisse'' (1874) had expressed 

 the opinion that the principal factor in the psychic 

 activity of ants was not individual intelligence, but 

 social instincts (p. 444). Although he pretends to 

 find even among ants remarkable proofs of intellect, 

 he maintains that it cannot compare with the individual 

 intelligence of the higher Vertebrates (as apes, seals, 

 elephants, etc.). Most of my critics, likewise, espe- 

 cially Forel and Smalian, in discussing my book 

 ''The Compound Nests and Mixed Colonies of Ants," 

 conceded that ants were guided in their life and doings 

 almost exclusively by their social instincts. With the 

 higher Vertebrates, however, intelligence is said to 

 preponderate gradually over instinct. This is postu- 

 lated by Darwin's theory of evolution, which other- 

 wise would be unable to explain the mental evolution 

 of man from the animal kingdom. The only possible 

 explanation according to this theory is to assume 

 that, to the individual mammal-intelligence of the 

 hypothetical ancestors of man, there was added, 

 through the development of community life, a higher 



