rEBRUAKT 9, 1917] 



SCIENCE 



131 



harsh truth which is a law. With a police 

 power guided by intelligence and sym- 

 pathy, some of the harshness in this in- 

 evitable human condition may be ame- 

 liorated, but the paleontologist looking at 

 the record of life on the earth says to this 

 state: Be intelligently guided in the treat- 

 ment of hereditary community parasites, 

 defectives, congenital or confirmed mis- 

 demeanants, whatever the form of degenera- 

 tion may be, by recognition of the pre- 

 sumption that in so far as they can not be 

 physiologically corrected, they are aban- 

 doned types in which there lies little hope 

 of repair. I can state this conclusion only 

 thus succinctly without here attempting to 

 present or argiie its many ramifications. 



(6) Soon after the great outburst of artic- 

 ulate life in the Cambrian, wherein, so 

 far as our present knowledge permits, we 

 find the lines along which have come the 

 complicated expressions of to-day; some- 

 where in there, we may not say securely 

 now, branched out the great phylum which 

 led into the world of insects. We are wont 

 to say that the first whirr of insect wings 

 was made by the dragon flies and great 

 cockroaches of the Devonian forests — an 

 admission which of course implies that long 

 earlier ages saw the differentiation of this 

 type of life. At all events the six-legged 

 type of articulates adapted to life in the 

 water and air, full of vivacity and agility, 

 with full independence, equipped with all 

 potentialities that come from abundant 

 innervation — ^this type, this six-legged 

 articulate expression of existence, the in- 

 secta, started reasonably early on its career. 

 It is my desire to note only in passing that, 

 however close and direct may be the deriva- 

 tion of the vertebrate type from the primi- 

 tive articulate stock, we have no inher- 

 itance from and hence only a collateral 

 interest in this six-legged type of artic- 

 ulate life. Yet the outcome of develop- 



ment along this line has led to most extraor- 

 dinary displays of morphological and 

 psychic differentiation. A distinguished 

 naturalist has said that the brain of an ant 

 is the most marvelous speck of matter in 

 existence. I hardly need, before this audi- 

 ence, to recall the exquisite and minute 

 specialization in morphology, physiological 

 function, performance and, I should say, 

 conscious or at least psychic behavior 

 among the most advanced attainments of 

 development in the six-legged articulates, 

 the social insects. The ant colony is. the 

 ideal of differentiation of function. Its 

 members are by birth and inheritance, food 

 and training, destined to certain specific 

 duties in the colony. Armies are mar- 

 shalled, wars are waged, the wounded 

 nursed, the captives are trained for their 

 duties, gardens are planted and crops are 

 harvested; the stock is fed and food is 

 stored, and a score of marvelous concerted 

 doings which amaze us by the perfection 

 of their totality, which is — the welfare of 

 the community. Here the individual is 

 actually constructed nervously and phys- 

 ically, anatomically and physiologically, for 

 the niche in the community which he is 

 destined to fill. No human community 

 where cooperative efficiency has submerged 

 the individual and has been the objective 

 and the attainment, no such human com- 

 munity has ever yet reached such an ideal 

 of joint effectiveness as has a colony of 

 ants. The ants are nature's great triumph, 

 her highest performance in communistic 

 effort and in cooperative achievement. 

 And what has come or can come of devel- 

 opment along this line? 



Let us look back a little into the ante- 

 cedents of the ants. Says Professor 

 Wheeler : 



So many genera and species of these insects ap- 

 pear full fledged in the early Tertiary we are com- 

 pelled to believe that they must have existed in 



