262 
WAR AMONG THE ANTS. 
tion, which employ as servants, nurses, and cooks, certain small ants 
endowed with more skill and ingenuity. 
This strange fact, which ought apparently to change our ideas 
of animal morality, was discovered early in the present century. 
Pierre Huber, the son of the celebrated observer of the manners and 
habits of bees, walking one day in a field near Geneva, saw on the 
ground a strong detachment of reddish-coloured ants on the march, and 
bethought himself of following them. On the flanks of the column, as 
if to dress its ranks, a few speed to and fro in eager haste. After march¬ 
ing for about a quarter of an hour, they halt before an ant-hill belong¬ 
ing to the small black ant, and a desperate struggle takes place at its 
gates. 
A small number of the blacks offer a brave resistance ; but the great 
majority of the people thus assailed flee through the gates remotest 
from the scene of combat, carrying away their young. It was just 
these which were the cause of the strife; what the blacks most justly 
feared was the theft of their offspring. And soon the assailants, who 
had succeeded in penetrating into the city, might be seen emerging 
from it loaded with the young black progeny. It was an exact resem¬ 
blance of a descent of slave-dealers on the coast of Africa. 
The red ants, encumbered with their living booty, left the unfor¬ 
tunate city in the desolation of its great loss, and resumed the road to 
their own habitation, whither their astonished and almost breathless 
observer followed them. But how was his astonishment augmented 
when, at the threshold of the red ants’ community, a small population 
of black ants came forward to receive the plunder, welcoming with 
visible joy these children of their own race, which, undoubtedly, would 
perpetuate it in the foreign land. 
This, then, is a mixed city, where the strong warrior-ants live in a 
perfectly good understanding with the little blacks. But what do 
the latter ? Huber speedily discovered that, in effect, they do every¬ 
thing. They alone build; they alone bring up the young red ants and 
the captives of their own species; they alone administer the affairs of 
the community, provide its supplies of food, wait upon and nourish 
their red masters, who, like great infant giants, indolently allow their 
