1879.] 
between Man and Brute. 
149 
characteristic feature of humanity is effected by exceptional 
individuals who arise in certain races under favourable cir- 
cumstances only, and is quite compatible with long in- 
tervals of immobility, and even of decline. Can a property 
so rare and fluctuating be made an essential point in any 
definition of man, or can it be used to establish a “ great 
gulf” between him and the brute creation? 
Further, it is nowise proved that the lower animals are 
literally incapable of progress. Our acquaintance with the 
habits and powers of most brute species, incomplete even at 
the present day, is far too recent to justify such an assump- 
tion. On the other hand, cases are not wanting which can 
scarcely be regarded in any other light than as inventions 
made, e.g., by ants. Thus, from a work recently noticed in 
the “Quarterly Journal of Science,”* we quote the fol- 
lowing incident recorded by Prof. Gredler, of Boston : — 
“ One of his colleagues had for months been in the habit of 
sprinkling pounded sugar on the sill of his window, for a 
train of ants which passed in constant procession from the 
garden to the window. One day he took it into his head to 
put the pounded sugar into a vessel which he fastened with 
a string to the transom of the window, and, in order that 
his long-petted insects might have information of the supply 
suspended above, a number of the same set of ants were 
placed with the sugar in the vessel. These busy creatures 
forthwith seized on the particles of sugar, and soon dis- 
covering the only way open to them — viz., up the string, 
over the transom, and down the window-frame — rejoined 
their fellows on the sill, whence they could resume the old 
route down the wall into the garden. Before long the route 
over the new track, from the sill to the sugar by the 
window-frame, transom, and string, was completely esta- 
blished, and so passed a day or two without anything new. 
Then one morning it was noticed that the ants were 
stopping at their old place, the window-sill, and again 
getting sugar there. Not a single individual any longer 
traversed the path that led thence to the sugar above. 
This was not because the store above had been exhausted, 
but because some dozen little fellows were working away 
vigorously and incessantly up aloft in the vessel, dragging 
the sugar-crumbs to its edge, and throwing them down to 
their comrades below on the sill — a sill which, with their 
limited range of vision, they could not possibly see.” 
This is indisputably an instance of invention, and as all 
* Flowers and their Unbidden Guests, p. 21 . 
