436 
Our Six-footed Rivals , 
[Odtober, 
Concerning the government either of the agricultural ants 
or of other species our knowledge is of a very negative cha- 
racter. The queens, or rather mothers, of the city are 
indeed treated with great attention, but their number is 
quite indefinite, and, unlike female hive-bees, no jealousy 
exists between them. How their migrations, their wars, 
their slave-hunts are decided on, or even how the guards on 
duty are appointed, and the visiting parties selected who go 
round to inspect the works, and who sometimes insist on 
the destruction and rebuilding of any badly-executed portion, 
we are utterly ignorant. The outer manifestations of 
ant-life we have to some extent traced, but its inner springs, 
its directing and controlling powers have eluded our ob- 
servation. 
It has been remarked in the “ Quarterly Journal of 
Science ” that ants, unlike man, have solved the problem 
of the practical organisation of communism : this is literally 
true. In a formicary we can deteCt no trace of private 
property ; the territory, the buildings, the stores, the booty, 
exist equally for the benefit of all. Every ant has its wants 
supplied, and each in return is prepared to work or to fight 
for the community as zealously as if the benefit of such 
toil and peril were to accrue to itself alone. If the principle 
— so common among men — that there is no harm in robbing 
or defrauding a municipal body, or the nation at large, crops 
up in an ant-hill at all, it must evidently be stamped out 
with an old-fashioned promptitude. But to understand why 
the ant has succeeded where man has failed, we must turn 
to certain fundamental distinctions between human and ant 
society, or perhaps, speaking more general, between the 
associations of vertebrate and those of annulose animals. 
A human tribe or nation — and in like manner, e.g., a com- 
munity of beavers or of rooks — is formed by the aggregation 
not of single individuals, but of groups, each consisting of 
a male, a female, and their offspring. The social unit among 
vertebrates, therefore, is the family, whether permanent or 
temporary, and whether monogamous or polygamous. In 
numberless cases the family exists without combining with 
other families to form a nation, but we greatly doubt if there 
exists a single case of a vertebrate nation not formed of and 
resolvable into families. 
Among the Annulosa this is reversed. The family among 
them scarcely exists at all. Rarely is the union of the male 
and the female extended beyond the aCtual intercourse, all 
provision for the future young devolving upon the latter 
alone. Among the rare exceptions to this rule we may 
