45 ° 
Our Six-footed Rivals.. 
[October, 
observed to be put to death. Among the agricultural ants 
prisoners have been known to be brought in by a fellow- 
citizen and handed over in a very rough manner to the 
guards who are always on duty on the level ground before 
the city, and who carry off the offender into the underground 
passages. What is his after fate is not known. It is almost 
needless to point out that even the faintest rudiment of law 
proves the existence of some notions of right and wrong, as 
well as of a power of communication which must go into 
minute details. 
We have now to deal with the great question whether the 
civilisation of ants, like that of man, has been gradually 
and slowly developed by the accumulation of experience, or 
whether — as the believers in the fixity of habits and instincts 
still contend — it is primordial, coexistent with the species in 
all the details which we now observe. Direbb historical 
evidence is here yet more difficult to obtain than as concerns 
animal strubbure. We smile, with just reason, at the French 
savants of the Egyptian expedition who imagined that by 
the study of the animal-mummies there preserved they 
might gain some light on — or rather find some argument 
against — the mutation of species. At the same time we 
readily admit that could we find a complete series of skele- 
tons, anatomical preparations, or even photographs of the 
best-known animals made at intervals of a century and ex- 
tending backwards for say a hundred thousand years, the 
dobtrine of evolution would be brought to a crucial test. 
But concerning the former habits and instinbts of animals 
correct information is far more difficult to obtain. The 
“ stone book ” is silent or oracularly vague. Even if we 
had written documents left us by some naturalist of the 
Miocene ages — if we can suppose such a being to have 
existed — what security should we have for the accuracy and 
the completeness of his researches ? 
To meet this difficulty an attempt remarkable for its 
subtle ingenuity has been made by Prof. Hee'r. He points 
out that, according to the reckoning of the most discreet 
geologists, at least a thousand centuries must have elapsed 
since Britain was severed from the continent of Europe. 
For this long stretch of time, therefore, British animals 
must have been cut off from their representatives in France, 
Belgium, and Switzerland. If, then, the habits of a certain 
slave-holding ant ( Formica sanguinea) in England are found 
identical, as he maintains, with the habits of the same 
species in Switzerland, there is a strong presumption that 
its economy has undergone no change for the last hundred 
