THE MIND OF A GARDENING ANT 133 



also to an exactly opposite conclusion. The actions 

 performed demanded so much mental power, and 

 the evidence of mental action was so slight, and 

 our powers of apprehending functions so aloof from 

 our sensations so limited, that the whole of their 

 complicated life and actions was set down as purely 

 automatic. Every action ascribable to reason, from 

 the making of the hexagonal cell of the honey-bee in 

 which the utmost carrying capacity is obtained with 

 the least expenditure of material to the making of 

 " mushroom-beds " by the parasol ants, is thus ascribed 

 to blind obedience to inherited instinct, or knowledge 

 " prior to experience." 



In the light of this conclusion, the ants which make 

 such admirable dwellings and storehouses that they 

 arrest the germination of seeds, or, when needed, 

 permit them to sprout and undergo the exact chemical 

 change needed to turn them into ants' food, and arrest 

 this again at the proper stage ; and whose cities are 

 peopled with dependants living on the " crumbs which 

 fall from their table " there are three hundred species 

 of such ant parasites in Germany alone are to-day as 

 brainless as the newly hatched cuckoo, which when 

 still blind and naked, at once addresses itself to the 

 task of ejecting its fellow-nestlings. 



Both the one and the other of these extreme views 

 are, we think, due mainly to the initial difficulty of 

 apprehending the mental processes of insects in the 

 absence of the signs and tokens by which we under- 

 stand the working of the brain of vertebrates. It 

 is as if we were trying to receive a message in aerial 



