ANTS — GENERAL INTELLIGENCE, 
123 
seem to admit of being reasonably comprised under the 
category of instinctive action, if by the latter we mean 
action pursued without knowledge of the relation between 
the means adopted and the ends attained. 
It will be remembered that our test of instinctive as 
distinguished from truly intelligent action is simply 
'whether all individuals of a species perform similar adap- 
tive movements under the stimulus supplied by similar 
and habitual circumstances, or whether they manifest in- 
dividual and peculiar adaptive movements to meet the 
exigencies of novel and peculiar circumstances. The im- 
portance of this distinction may be rendered manifest by 
the following illustrations. 
We have already seen that the ants which Sir John 
Lubbock observed display many and complex instincts, 
w r hich together might seem to justify us in anticipating 
that animals which present such wonderful instincts must 
also present sufficient general intelligence to meet simple 
though novel exigencies by such simple adaptations as the 
unfamiliar circumstances require. Yet experiments which 
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Fig. 8. 
he made in this connection seem to show that such is not 
the case, but that these ants, with all their wealth of 
instinctive endowments, are utterly destitute of intelli- 
gent resources; they have abundance of common and 
detailed knowledge (supposing the adaptations to be made 
consciously) how to act under certain complex though 
familiar circumstances, but appear quite unable to origi- 
nate any adaptive action to obviate even the simplest 
conceivable difficulty, if this is of a kind which they have 
not been previously accustomed to meet. Thus, on a 
horizontal rod B supported in a saucer of water s, and 
therefore inaccessible to the ants from beneath, he placed 
some larvae A. On the nest N he then placed a block of 
wood c d, constructed so that the portion d should touch 
