Ants and Butterflies. 1 7 1 



In the present instance, apart from the absurdity of the 

 poets in making ants making mole-hills, there is an illus- 

 tration of my meaning as to the " uselessness " of most 

 poetical mistakes. We find the ant busy on a mole-hill. 

 Now, how does the mole-hill improve or .adorn the fancy ? 

 Is the earth in any way whatever like a mole-hill? Is it 

 even a good simile? Now it is like an ant-hill, for when 

 viewed from the Olympus of genius it might seem to the 

 imagination the agglomerated result of infinite individual 

 labourers, each very small and weak, but by co-operation 

 capable of considerable achievements. Though even then 

 it is only strictly applicable to, say, a city, and if so applied 

 forms a fairly accurate and delightful simile. 



But a mole-hill ! The heap of soil which a single sub- 

 terranean labourer, working in the dark, throws up fortuit- 

 ously and at random, and in a minute or two, and not only 

 one, but a whole row of them, and never thinks any more of 

 them, does not even know of their existence ! It would, in 

 fact, be very difficult indeed to think of any natural pheno- 

 menon that was less like the earth, less like the busy haunts 

 of mankind, less sensible, less poetical, than a mole-\\\\\. 

 Yet with the word ant actually on their pens, on the paper, 

 the poets one after the other talk rubbish about " us pismires " 

 and " us emmets " toiling and moiling over a mole-hill. 



That we human beings have much in common with the 

 " innumerous emmet," has been most delightfully demon- 

 strated by many writers from Homer to Lubbock, but 

 philosophic Young is hardly felicitous when he speaks of the 

 race as "vagrant emmets on an air-suspended ball." If 

 there is one thing which ants are not, it is "vagrant." 

 There are, of course, nomadic species, the Bedouins and 

 Tartars of the formic kind. But the common ant is not a 

 vagabond. As opposed to many gipsy insects, it is in Rom- 

 many language emphatically a "house-dweller." Its paths 

 all lead into highways, and its highways all converge upon 



