THE MIND OF A GARDENING ANT 135 



were doing. This was one of the very rare instances 

 in which our senses suggest what was probably in the 

 minds of the insects. But what of the thousand 

 instances in which this is at present hidden from us ? 



Another source of error, which supports the theory 

 that insects are machines " wound up to go of them- 

 selves," is the fictitious appearance of mechanism, and 

 the likeness to automata which well-organised industrial 

 work usually presents, whether carried on by men or 

 insects. When the object is purely material and this 

 is the case in a bee-hive as much as in an engineering 

 shop or a pin factory the more perfect the organisa- 

 tion the more automatic it appears to be. A dozen 

 men at similar machines going through the same 

 movements, or thirty girls rolling cigarettes, if seen 

 through a diminishing-glass reducing them to the size 

 of white ants, would look very mechanical creatures 

 indeed. An enlarged ant, with a pair of unimproved 

 eyes, looking down on thousands of acres of Indian 

 paddy-fields, with brown-skinned creatures creeping 

 about all day mending little banks, and going at 

 night into little huts on bigger banks, might easily 

 conceive them to be mere unintelligent insects, work- 

 ing successfully, on some inherited but now perfectly 

 unintelligent system, to prolong their existence, in- 

 crease, and multiply. 



