ANTS AND ANT LIFE. 59 



and in reality is that which our most idealist political and 

 social reformers are wont to put forward as the last and 

 mightiest aim of human efforts after perfection in this 

 direction, that which Plato and Thomas More have already 

 pointed out as such. If the democrats of the latest style 

 had to find a polity fashioned after their own ideas, 

 or to govern a " Proletariat State," no better advice 

 could be given them than to take as model the poli- 

 tical and social arrangements of ants. The ant-state 

 is a " Proletariat State " in the fullest and truest sense 

 of the word, in the direction of which only the wing- 

 less, sexless, worker-ants, which have no families of their 

 own to look after, take part, while the winged males and 

 fertile females are kept as prisoners in the nest, and are only 

 fed and nurtured for the sake of their progeny. The ex- 

 pression " sexless " is really not appropriate to the men, or 

 rather women-workers, for these are really females with 

 arrested sexual organs, so that the state is constituted under 

 completely feminine rule. As P. Huber remarks, they are 

 women whose moral qualities have been developed at the 

 cost of their physical. The individual ant does not possess 

 a family, for the principle of public and state training of 

 children such as the philosopher Plato is known to have 

 desired in his Republic, and which indeed would be necessary 

 in a fully-organised " Proletariat State " is thoroughly 

 carried out in the Ant Republic. 



That, further, the worker-ants were formerly winged, and 

 were therefore more like the perfectly developed females 

 than they now are, is shown in the interesting discovery, 

 lately made by Dr. Dewitz, of rudimentary or arrested 

 wings in the pupae. 



The males and fertile females, which (the former more 

 than the latter) are far behind the workers in intelligence, 

 and only live for amusement and for propagation, are, as we 

 have said, kept in the nest like prisoners, and have no other 

 vocation than the maintenance of the colony ; even this 

 vocation is carried on only by the permission of the working 

 population and under their strict superintendence. On a 

 warm sunny day they are allowed to quit the nest, or 

 dwelling, and for a change to take a constitutional on the 

 surface. But they are then watched by a number of 

 workers, which prevent them from flying away. There is 



