I02 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



logically for the niche in the community which he is destined to 

 fill. No human community where cooperative efficiency has sub- 

 merged the individual and has been the objective and the attain- 

 ment, no such human community 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 development along this line? 



Let us look back a little into the antecedents of the ants. Says 

 Professor Wheeler, " So many genera and species of these insects 

 appear full fledged in the early Tertiary we are compelled to 

 believe that they must have existed in the Trias or even in the 

 Lias, but belonged to so few genera and species, or lived in such 

 small communities that they left no remains." This distinguished 

 student cites 276 Tertiary species as indicative of their sudden out- 

 burst, or perhaps it w^ould be safer to say the development of better 

 modes for their preservation, and he has further stated that there 

 is no reliable observation to prove that polymorphism was existent 

 among the earliest ants of this long period. This differentiation 

 does, however, show itself in the fossil ants of the Quaternary. 



This paramount attainment of intellectual activity in the line of 

 insect development, in the line of the six-legged type, would seem 

 thus to have been accomplished largely through the same period of 

 time when the human line was perfecting its mentality. The psy- 

 chology of the two ultimate results is separated by processes and 

 directions of development as wide apart as the poles. Neither is 

 to be expressed, perhaps, in terms of the other. The results too 

 are wide asunder — one a deadly communism, a moribund partition 

 of labor, a lethal socialism ; the other an active, progressive and 

 fertile individualism. For the former the student of nature's history 

 sees no outcome. These too are nature's experiments. The six- 

 legged type with all its purposes in its highest expression lies 

 prostrate on the ground at our feet, it and its achievements have 

 risen to nothing higher than an ant hill, its communistic relations and 

 subservience are entirely apart from the true genius of humanity. 

 Socialism and communism have been tried out and found wanting, 

 and nature holds conspicuously before the eye of the state the 

 warning that they have nothing either for the growth of the spirit 

 or the progress of the intellect. 



c I regard as peculiarly a doctrine of paleontology, one whose 

 demonstration or confutation would be hopeless in the hands of 



