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THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 189 



imagines he already represents. Ants remember, 

 and a fact becomes impressed by repetition, show- 

 ing that the faculty of memory in ants is governed 

 by the same laws as is this faculty in man. Sir 

 John Lubbock found it necessary to teach his ants 

 the way by repeating the lesson where the way 

 was long or unusual. * Sensation, perception, and 

 association follow in the social insects, on the 

 whole, the same fundamental laws as in the verte- 

 brates, including ourselves. Furthermore, atten- 

 tion is surprisingly developed in insects ' (Forel). 

 Ants keep standing armies, make alliances, and 

 maraud neighbouring states. They have their 

 wars, civil and foreign, and their massacres and 

 enslavements of the conquered. But they have 

 never got so low yet, so far as anyone knows, as 

 to hypocritically prosecute their conquests in the 

 name of God and humanity. The battlefields of 

 ants resemble the carnage-plains of men, strewn 

 with ghastly corpses and covered with the head- 

 less and dying. And the accounts of their expedi- 

 tions — their going forth in regular columns, with 

 captains, scouts, and skirmish lines, their battles, 

 and their return laden with plunder and captives 

 — read like the grisly tales of human history. 

 Ants perform, in short, about all the antics of 

 civilised man, except maltreating the females and 

 drinking gin. And shall we say their civilisation 

 is less real because it is miniature and because it 

 is carried on far below the Brobdingnagian con- 

 templations of man ? * When we see an ant-hill 

 tenanted by thousands of industrious inhabitants, 



