CHAP. V Social Life of Animals 85 



ing, that the Termites or " white ants " (which are not ants at 

 all) are apt to receive scant justice. Perhaps inferior in intel- 

 ligence, they have the precedence of greater antiquity and 

 all the interest which attaches to an old-established society. 

 Nor is their importance less either to practical men or to 

 speculative biologists. In 1781 Smeathman gave some 

 account of their economy, noting that there were in every 

 species three castes, " first, the working insects, which, for 

 brevity, I shall generally call labourers ; next, the fighting 

 ones or soldiers, which do no kind of labour ; and, last of 

 all, the winged ones, ox perfect insects, whith are male and 

 female, and capable of propagation." 



The " workers," blind and wingless, and smallest in the 

 ant-hill, do all the work of foraging and .mining, attending 

 the royal pair and nursing the young. The soldiers, also 

 blind and wingless, are much larger than the workers, but 

 there are relatively only a few in each hill. " They stand," 

 Prof Drummond says, " or promenade about as sentries, at 

 the mouths of the tunnels. When danger threatens, in the 

 shape of true ants, the soldier termite advances to the fight." 

 " With a few sweeps of its scythe-like jaws it clears the 

 ground, and while the attacking party is carrying off its 

 dead, the builders, unconscious of the fray, quietly continue 

 their work." At home, in the ant-hill, shut up in a chamber 

 whose door admits workers but is much too small for the 

 tenants to pass out if they would, a fortunate investigator 

 sometimes finds the royal pair. The male is sometimes 

 even larger than the soldier, and is in many ways different, 

 though by no means extraordinary. The queen -mother, 

 however, is a very strange organism. She measures two 

 to six inches, while the worker is only about a fifth of an 

 inch in length. Like her mate, she sees, and she once had 

 wings like his, but they have dropped off. The hind 

 part of the body is enormously distended with eggs, and 

 " the head bears about the same proportion to the rest of 

 the body as does the tuft on his Glengarry bonnet to a six- 

 foot Highlander." In her passivity and " phenomenal cor- 

 pulence," she is a sort of reductio ad absurdttm of femaleness 

 — " a large, cylindrical package, in shape like a sausage. 



