In the market-place at Santa Fé, in Mexico, peasant women from the
neighboring villages bring in for sale trayfuls of living ants, each
about as big and round as a large white currant, and each entirely
filled with honey or grape-sugar, much appreciated by the ingenuous
Mexican youth as an excellent substitute for Everton toffee. The method
of eating them would hardly command the approbation of the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It is simple and primitive, but
decidedly not humane. Ingenuous youth holds the ant by its head and
shoulders, sucks out the honey with which the back part is absurdly
distended, and throws away the empty body as a thing with which it
has now no further sympathy. Maturer age buys the ants by the quart,
presses out the honey through a muslin strainer, and manufactures it
into a very sweet intoxicating drink, something like shandygaff, as I
am credibly informed by bold persons who have ventured to experiment
upon it, taken internally.
The curious insect which thus serves as an animated sweetmeat for
the Mexican children is the honey-ant of the Garden of the Gods; and
it affords a beautiful example of Mandeville's charming paradox that
personal vices are public benefits—_vitia privata humana commoda_. The
honey-ant is a greedy individual who has nevertheless nobly devoted
himself for the good of the community by converting himself into a
living honey-jar, from which all the other ants in his own nest may
help themselves freely from time to time, as occasion demands. The
tribe to which he belongs lives underground, in a dome-roofed vault,
and only one particular caste among the workers, known as rotunds from
their expansive girth, is told off for this special duty of storing
honey within their own bodies. Clinging to the top of their nest,
with their round, transparent abdomens hanging down loosely, mere
globules of skin enclosing the pale amber-colored honey, these Daniel
Lamberts of the insect race look for all the world like clusters of
the little American Delaware grapes, with an ant's legs and head stuck
awkwardly on to the end instead of a stalk. They have, in fact,
realised in everyday life the awful fate of Mr. Gilbert's discontented
sugar-broker, who laid on flesh and “adipose deposit” until he became
converted at last into a perfect rolling ball of globular humanity.
The manners of the honey-ant race are very simple. Most of the members
of each community are active and roving in their dispositions, and
show no tendency to undue distension of the nether extremities. They
go out at night and collect nectar or honey-dew from the gall-insects
on oak-trees; for the gall-insect, like love in the old Latin saw, is
fruitful both in sweets and bitters, _melle et felle_. This nectar
they then carry home, and give it to the rotunds or honey-bearers, who
swallow it and store it in their round abdomen until they can hold
no more, having stretched their skins literally to the very point of
bursting. They pass their time, like the Fat Boy in “Pickwick,” chiefly
in sleeping, but they cling upside down meanwhile to the roof of their
residence. When the workers in turn require a meal, they go up to the
nearest honey-bearer and stroke her gently with their antennæ. The
honey-bearer thereupon throws up her head and regurgitates a large drop
of the amber liquid. (“Regurgitates” is a good word, which I borrow
from Dr. McCook, of Philadelphia, the great authority upon honey-ants;
and it saves an immense deal of trouble in looking about for a
respectable periphrasis). The workers feed upon the drops thus exuded,
two or three at once often standing around the living honey-jar, and
lapping nectar together from the lips of their devoted comrade. This
may seem at first sight rather an unpleasant practice on the part
of the ants; but, after all, how does it really differ from our own
habit of eating honey which has been treated in very much the same
unsophisticated manner by the domestic bee?
Worse things than these, however, Dr. McCook records to the discredit
of the Colorado honey-ant. When he was opening some nests in the
Garden of the Gods, he happened accidentally to knock down some of the
rotunds, which straightway burst asunder in the middle, and scattered
their store of honey on the floor of the nest. At once the other ants,
tempted away from their instinctive task of carrying off the cocoons
and young grubs, clustered around their unfortunate companion, like
street boys around a broken molasses barrel, and instead of forming
themselves forthwith into a volunteer ambulance company, proceeded
immediately to lap up the honey from their dying brother. On the other
hand, it must be said, to the credit of the race, that (unlike the
members of Arctic expeditions) they never desecrate the remains of the
dead. When a honey-bearer dies at his post, a victim to his zeal for
the common good, the workers carefully remove his cold corpse from the
roof where it still clings, clip off the head and shoulders from the
distended abdomen, and convey their deceased brother piecemeal, in two
detachments, to the formican cemetery, undisturbed. If they chose,
they might only bury the front half of their late relation, while they
retained his remaining moiety as an available honey-bag: but from this
cannibal proceeding ant-etiquette recoils in decent horror; and the
amber globes are “pulled up galleries, rolled along rooms, and bowled
into the graveyard, along with the juiceless heads, legs, and other
members.” Such fraternal conduct would be very creditable to the worker
honey-ants, were it not for a horrid doubt insinuated by Dr. McCook
that perhaps the insects don't know they could get at the honey by
breaking up the body of their lamented relative. If so, their apparent
disregard of utilitarian considerations may really be due not to their
sentimentality but to their hopeless stupidity.
The reason why the ants have taken thus to storing honey in the living
bodies of their own fellows is easy enough to understand. They want to
lay up for the future, like prudent insects that they are; but they
can't make wax, as the bees do, and they have not yet evolved the
purely human art of pottery. Consequently—happy thought—why not tell
off some of our number to act as jars on behalf of the others? Some of
the community work by going out and gathering honey; they also serve
who only stand and wait—who receive it from the workers, and keep it
stored up in their own capacious india-rubber maws till further notice.
So obvious is this plan for converting ants into animated honey-jars,
that several different kinds of ants in different parts of the world,
belonging to the most widely distinct families, have independently hit
upon the very self-same device. Besides the Mexican species, there is
a totally different Australian honey-ant, and another equally separate
in Borneo and Singapore. This last kind does not store the honey in
the hind part of the body, technically known as the abdomen, but in
the middle division which naturalists call the thorax, where it forms
a transparent bladder-like swelling, and makes the creature look as
though it were suffering with an acute attack of dropsy. In any case,
the life of a honey-bearer must be singularly uneventful, not to say
dull and monotonous; but no doubt any small inconvenience in this
respect must be more than compensated for by the glorious consciousness
that one is sacrificing one's own personal comfort for the common good
of universal anthood. Perhaps, however, the ants have not yet reached
the Positivist stage, and may be totally ignorant of the enthusiasm of
formicity.
Equally curious are the habits and manners of the harvesting ants,
the species which Solomon seems to have had specially in view when he
advised his hearers to go to the ant—a piece of advice which I have
also adopted as the title of the present article, though I by no means
intend thereby to insinuate that the readers of this magazine ought
properly to be classed as sluggards. These industrious little creatures
abound in India: they are so small that it takes eight or ten of them
to carry a single grain of wheat or barley; and yet they will patiently
drag along their big burden for five hundred or a thousand yards to
the door of their formicary. To prevent the grain from germinating,
they bite off the embryo root—a piece of animal intelligence outdone
by another species of ant, which actually allows the process of
budding to begin, so as to produce sugar, as in malting. After the
last thunderstorms of the monsoon the little proprietors bring up
all the grain from their granaries to dry in the tropical sunshine.
The quantity of grain stored up by the harvesting ants is often so
large that the hair-splitting Jewish casuists of the Mishna have
seriously discussed the question whether it belongs to the landowner
or may lawfully be appropriated by the gleaners. “They do not appear,”
says Sir John Lubbock, “to have considered the rights of the ants.”
Indeed our duty towards insects is a question which seems hitherto to
have escaped the notice of all moral philosophers. Even Mr. Herbert
Spencer, the prophet of individualism, has never taken exception to
our gross disregard of the proprietary rights of bees in their honey,
or of silkworms in their cocoons. There are signs, however, that the
obtuse human conscience is awakening in this respect; for when Dr. Loew
suggested to bee-keepers the desirability of testing the commercial
value of honey-ants, as rivals to the bee, Dr. McCook replied that “the
sentiment against the use of honey thus taken from living insects,
which is worthy of all respect, would not be easily overcome.”
There are no harvesting ants in Northern Europe, though they extend
as far as Syria, Italy, and the Riviera, in which latter station I
have often observed them busily working. What most careless observers
take for grain in the nests of English ants are of course really
the cocoons of the pupæ. For many years, therefore, entomologists
were under the impression that Solomon had fallen into this popular
error, and that when he described the ant as “gathering her food in
the harvest” and “preparing her meat in the summer,” he was speaking
rather as a poet than as a strict naturalist. Later observations,
however, have vindicated the general accuracy of the much-married king
by showing that true harvesting ants do actually occur in Syria, and
that they lay by stores for the winter in the very way stated by that
early entomologist, whose knowledge of “creeping things” is specially
enumerated in the long list of his universal accomplishments.
Dr. Lincecum of Texan fame has even improved upon Solomon by his
discovery of those still more interesting and curious creatures, the
agricultural ants of Texas. America is essentially a farming country,
and the agricultural ants are born farmers. They make regular
clearings around their nests, and on these clearings they allow nothing
to grow except a particular kind of grain, known as ant-rice. Dr.
Lincecum maintains that the tiny farmers actually sow and cultivate the
ant-rice. Dr. McCook, on the other hand, is of opinion that the rice
sows itself, and that the insects' part is limited to preventing any
other plants or weeds from encroaching on the appropriated area. In any
case, be they squatters or planters, it is certain that the rice, when
ripe, is duly harvested, and that it is, to say the least, encouraged
by the ants, to the exclusion of all other competitors. “After the
maturing and harvesting of the seed,” says Dr. Lincecum, “the dry
stubble is cut away and removed from the pavement, which is thus left
fallow until the ensuing autumn, when the same species of grass, and in
the same circle, appears again, and receives the same agricultural care
as did the previous crop.” Sir John Lubbock, indeed, goes so far as to
say that the three stages of human progress—the hunter, the herdsman,
and the agriculturist—are all to be found among various species of
existing ants.
The Saüba ants of tropical America carry their agricultural operations
a step further. Dwelling in underground nests, they sally forth upon
the trees, and cut out of the leaves large round pieces, about as big
as a shilling. These pieces they drop upon the ground, where another
detachment is in waiting to convey them to the galleries of the nest.
There they store enormous quantities of these round pieces, which
they allow to decay in the dark, so as to form a sort of miniature
mushroom bed. On the mouldering vegetable heap they have thus piled
up, they induce a fungus to grow, and with this fungus they feed their
young grubs during their helpless infancy. Mr. Belt, the “Naturalist
in Nicaragua,” found that native trees suffered far less from their
depredations than imported ones. The ants hardly touched the local
forests, but they stripped young plantations of orange, coffee, and
mango trees stark naked. He ingeniously accounts for this curious fact
by supposing that an internecine struggle has long been going on in
the countries inhabited by the Saübas between the ants and the forest
trees. Those trees that best resisted the ants, owing either to
some unpleasant taste or to hardness of foliage have in the long run
survived destruction; but those which were suited for the purpose of
the ants have been reduced to nonentity, while the ants in turn were
getting slowly adapted to attack other trees. In this way almost all
the native trees have at last acquired some special means of protection
against the ravages of the leaf-cutters; so that they immediately fall
upon all imported and unprotected kinds as their natural prey. This
ingenious and wholly satisfactory explanation must of course go far to
console the Brazilian planters for the frequent loss of their orange
and coffee crops.
Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the Darwinian theory
(whose honors he waived with rare generosity in favor of the older
and more distinguished naturalist), tells a curious story about the
predatory habits of these same Saübas. On one occasion, when he was
wandering about in search of specimens on the Rio Negro, he bought a
peck of rice, which was tied up, Indian fashion, in the local bandanna
of the happy plantation slave. At night he left his rice incautiously
on the bench of the hut where he was sleeping; and next morning the
Saübas had riddled the handkerchief like a sieve, and carried away a
gallon of the grain for their own felonious purposes. The underground
galleries which they dig can often be traced for hundreds of yards;
and Mr. Hamlet Clark even asserts that in one case they have tunnelled
under the bed of a river where it is a quarter of a mile wide. This
beats Brunel on his own ground into the proverbial cocked hat, both for
depth and distance.
Within doors, in the tropics, ants are apt to put themselves
obtrusively forward in a manner little gratifying to any except the
enthusiastically entomological mind. The winged females, after their
marriage flight, have a disagreeable habit of flying in at the open
doors and windows at lunch time, settling upon the table like the
Harpies in the Æneid, and then quietly shuffling off their wings one at
a time, by holding them down against the table-cloth with one leg, and
running away vigorously with the five others. As soon as they have thus
disembarassed themselves of their superfluous members, they proceed
to run about over the lunch as if the house belonged to them, and to
make a series of experiments upon the edible qualities of the different
dishes. One doesn't so much mind their philosophical inquiries into the
nature of the bread or even the meat; but when they come to drowning
themselves by dozens, in the pursuit of knowledge, in the soup and the
sherry, one feels bound to protest energetically against the spirit
of martyrdom by which they are too profoundly animated. That is one
of the slight drawbacks of the realms of perpetual summer: in the
poets you see only one side of the picture—the palms, the orchids, the
humming-birds, the great trailing lianas; in practical life you see
the reverse side—the thermometer at 98°, the tepid drinking-water,
the prickly heat, the perpetual languor, the endless shoals of
aggressive insects. A lady of my acquaintance, indeed, made a valuable
entomological collection in her own dining-room, by the simple process
of consigning to pillboxes all the moths and flies and beetles that
settled upon the mangoes and star-apples in the course of dessert.
Another objectionable habit of the tropical ants, viewed practically,
is their total disregard of vested interests in the case of
house-property. Like Mr. George and his communistic friends, they
disbelieve entirely in the principle of private rights in real estate.
They will eat their way through the beams of your house till there is
only a slender core of solid wood left to support the entire burden.
I have taken down a rafter in my own house in Jamaica, originally 18
inches thick each way, with a sound circular centre of no more than
6 inches in diameter, upon which all the weight necessarily fell.
With the material extracted from the wooden beams they proceed to
add insult to injury by building long covered galleries right across
the ceiling of your drawing-room. As may be easily imagined, these
galleries do not tend to improve the appearance of the ceiling; and it
becomes necessary to form a Liberty and Property Defence League for
the protection of one's personal interests against the insect enemy. I
have no objection to ants building galleries on their own freehold, or
even to their nationalising the land in their native forests; but I
do object strongly to their unwarrantable intrusion upon the domain of
private life. Expostulation and active warfare, however, are equally
useless. The carpenter-ant has no moral sense, and is not amenable
either to kindness or blows. On one occasion, when a body of these
intrusive creatures had constructed an absurdly conspicuous brown
gallery straight across the ceiling of my drawing-room, I determined to
declare open war against them, and getting my black servant to bring
in the steps and a mop, I proceeded to demolish the entire gallery
just after breakfast. It was about twenty feet long, as well as I can
remember, and perhaps an inch in diameter. At one o'clock I returned to
lunch. My black servant pointed, with a broad grin on his intelligent
features, to the wooden ceiling. I looked up: in those three hours the
carpenter-ants had reconstructed the entire gallery, and were doubtless
mocking me at their ease, with their uplifted antennæ, under that safe
shelter. I retired at once from the unequal contest. It was clearly
impossible to go on knocking down a fresh gallery every three hours of
the day or night throughout a whole lifetime.
Ants, says Mr. Wallace, without one touch of satire, “force themselves
upon the attention of everyone who visits the tropics.” They do,
indeed, and that most pungently; if by no other method, at least by
the simple and effectual one of stinging. The majority of ants in
every nest are of course neuters, or workers, that is to say, strictly
speaking, undeveloped females, incapable of laying eggs. But they
still retain the ovipositor, which is converted into a sting, and
supplied with a poisonous liquid to eject afterwards into the wound.
So admirably adapted to its purpose is this beautiful provision of
nature, that some tropical ants can sting with such violence as to
make your leg swell and confine you for some days to your room; while
cases have even been known in which the person attacked has fainted
with pain, or had a serious attack of fever in consequence. It is not
every kind of ant, however, that can sting; a great many can only bite
with their little hard horny jaws, and then eject a drop of formic
poison afterwards into the hole caused by the bite. The distinction is
a delicate physiological one, not much appreciated by the victims of
either mode of attack. The perfect females can also sting, but not,
of course, the males, who are poor, wretched, useless creatures, only
good as husbands for the community, and dying off as soon as they have
performed their part in the world—another beautiful provision, which
saves the workers the trouble of killing them off, as bees do with
drones after the marriage flight of the queen bee.
The blind driver-ants of West Africa are among the very few species
that render any service to man, and that, of course, only incidentally.
Unlike most other members of their class, the driver-ants have no
settled place of residence; they are vagabonds and wanderers upon the
face of the earth, formican tramps, blind beggars, who lead a gipsy
existence, and keep perpetually upon the move, smelling their way
cautiously from one camping-place to another. They march by night,
or on cloudy days, like wise tropical strategists, and never expose
themselves to the heat of the day in broad sunshine, as though they
were no better than the mere numbered British Tommy Atkins at Coomassie
or in the Soudan. They move in vast armies across country, driving
everything before them as they go; for they belong to the stinging
division, and are very voracious in their personal habits. Not only
do they eat up the insects in their line of march, but they fall even
upon larger creatures and upon big snakes, which they attack first in
the eyes, the most vulnerable portion. When they reach a negro village
the inhabitants turn out _en masse_, and run away, exactly as if the
visitors were English explorers or brave Marines, bent upon retaliating
for the theft of a knife by nobly burning down King Tom's town or King
Jumbo's capital. Then the negroes wait in the jungle till the little
black army has passed on, after clearing out the huts by the way of
everything eatable. When they return they find their calabashes and
saucepans licked clean, but they also find every rat, mouse, lizard,
cockroach, gecko, and beetle completely cleared out from the whole
village. Most of them have cut and run at the first approach of the
drivers; of the remainder, a few blanched and neatly-picked skeletons
alone remain to tell the tale.
As I wish to be considered a veracious historian, I will not retail
the further strange stories that still find their way into books of
natural history about the manners and habits of these blind marauders.
They cross rivers, the West African gossips declare, by a number of
devoted individuals flinging themselves first into the water as a
living bridge, like so many six-legged Marcus Curtiuses, while over
their drowning bodies the heedless remainder march in safety to the
other side. If the story is not true, it is at least well invented;
for the ant-commonwealth everywhere carries to the extremest pitch the
old Roman doctrine of the absolute subjection of the individual to the
State. So exactly is this the case that in some species there are a few
large, overgrown, lazy ants in each nest, which do no work themselves,
but accompany the workers on their expeditions; and the sole use of
these idle mouths seems to be to attract the attention of birds and
other enemies, and so distract it from the useful workers, the mainstay
of the entire community. It is almost as though an army, marching
against a tribe of cannibals, were to place itself in the centre of a
hollow square formed of all the fattest people in the country, whose
fine condition and fitness for killing might immediately engross the
attention of the hungry enemy. Ants, in fact, have, for the most part,
already reached the goal set before us as a delightful one by most
current schools of socialist philosophers, in which the individual is
absolutely sacrificed in every way to the needs of the community.
The most absurdly human, however, among all the tricks and habits of
ants are their well-known cattle-farming and slaveholding instincts.
Everybody has heard, of course, how they keep the common rose-blight
as milch cows, and suck from them the sweet honey-dew. But everybody,
probably, does not yet know the large number of insects which they herd
in one form or another as domesticated animals. Man has, at most, some
twenty or thirty such, including cows, sheep, horses, donkeys, camels,
llamas, alpacas, reindeer, dogs, cats, canaries, pigs, fowl, ducks,
geese, turkeys, and silkworms. But ants have hundreds and hundreds,
some of them kept obviously for purposes of food; others apparently
as pets; and yet others again, as has been plausibly suggested, by
reason of superstition or as objects of worship. There is a curious
blind beetle which inhabits ants' nests, and is so absolutely dependent
upon its hosts for support that it has even lost the power of feeding
itself. It never quits the nest, but the ants bring it in food and
supply it by putting the nourishment actually into its mouth. But the
beetle, in return, seems to secrete a sweet liquid (or it may even be
a stimulant like beer, or a narcotic like tobacco) in a tuft of hairs
near the bottom of the hard wing-cases, and the ants often lick this
tuft with every appearance of satisfaction and enjoyment. In this case,
and in many others, there can be no doubt that the insects are kept for
the sake of food or some other advantage yielded by them.
But there are other instances of insects which haunt ants' nests,
which it is far harder to account for on any hypothesis save that of
superstitious veneration. There is a little weevil that runs about by
hundreds in the galleries of English ants, in and out among the free
citizens, making itself quite at home in their streets and public
places, but as little noticed by the ants themselves as dogs are in
our own cities. Then, again, there is a white woodlouse, something
like the common little armadillo, but blind from having lived so
long underground, which walks up and down the lanes and alleys of
antdom, without ever holding any communication of any sort with its
hosts and neighbors. In neither case has Sir John Lubbock ever seen
an ant take the slightest notice of the presence of these strange
fellow-lodgers. “One might almost imagine,” he says, “that they had the
cap of invisibility.” Yet it is quite clear that the ants deliberately
sanction the residence of the weevils and woodlice in their nests, for
any unauthorised intruder would immediately be set upon and massacred
outright. Sir John Lubbock suggests that they may perhaps be tolerated
as scavengers; or, again, it is possible that they may prey upon the
eggs or larvæ of some of the parasites to whose attacks the ants are
subject. In the first case, their use would be similar to that of the
wild dogs in Constantinople or the common black John-crow vultures in
tropical America: in the second case, they would be about equivalent to
our own cats or to the hedgehog often put in farmhouse kitchens to keep
down cockroaches.
The crowning glory of owning slaves, which many philosophic Americans
(before the war) showed to be the highest and noblest function of the
most advanced humanity, has been attained by more than one variety of
anthood. Our great English horse-ant is a moderate slave-holder; but
the big red ant of Southern Europe carries the domestic institution
many steps further. It makes regular slave-raids upon the nests of the
small brown ants, and carries off the young in their pupa condition.
By-and-by the brown ants hatch out in the strange nest, and, never
having known any other life except that of slavery, accommodate
themselves to it readily enough. The red ant, however, is still only
an occasional slaveowner; if necessary, he can get along by himself,
without the aid of his little brown servants. Indeed, there are free
states and slave states of red ants side by side with one another, as
of old in Maryland and Pennsylvania: in the first, the red ants do
their work themselves, like mere vulgar Ohio farmers; in the second,
they get their work done for them by their industrious little brown
servants, like the aristocratic first families of Virginia before the
earthquake of emancipation.
But there are other degraded ants, whose life-history may be humbly
presented to the consideration of the Anti-Slavery Society, as speaking
more eloquently than any other known fact for the demoralising effect
of slaveowning upon the slaveholders themselves. The Swiss rufescent
ant is a species so long habituated to rely entirely upon the services
of slaves that it is no longer able to manage its own affairs when
deprived by man of its hereditary bondsmen. It has lost entirely the
art of constructing a nest; it can no longer tend its own young,
whom it leaves entirely to the care of negro nurses; and its bodily
structure even has changed, for the jaws have lost their teeth, and
have been converted into mere nippers, useful only as weapons of war.
The rufescent ant, in fact, is a purely military caste, which has
devoted itself entirely to the pursuit of arms, leaving every other
form of activity to its slaves and dependents. Officers of the old
school will be glad to learn that this military insect is dressed, if
not in scarlet, at any rate in very decent red, and that it refuses to
be bothered in any way with questions of transport or commissariat. If
the community changes its nest, the masters are carried on the backs of
their slaves to the new position, and the black ants have to undertake
the entire duty of foraging and bringing in stores of supply for their
gentlemanly proprietors. Only when war is to be made upon neighboring
nests does the thin red line form itself into long file for active
service. Nothing could be more perfectly aristocratic than the views of
life entertained and acted upon by these distinguished slaveholders.
On the other hand, the picture has its reverse side, exhibiting clearly
the weak points of the slaveholding system. The rufescent ant has lost
even the very power of feeding itself. So completely dependent is each
upon his little black valet for daily bread, that he cannot so much
as help himself to the food that is set before him. Hüber put a few
slaveholders into a box with some of their own larvæ and pupæ, and a
supply of honey, in order to see what they would do with them. Appalled
at the novelty of the situation, the slaveholders seemed to come to
the conclusion that something must be done; so they began carrying
the larvæ about aimlessly in their mouths, and rushing up and down in
search of the servants. After a while, however, they gave it up and
came to the conclusion that life under such circumstances was clearly
intolerable. They never touched the honey, but resigned themselves to
their fate like officers and gentlemen. In less than two days, half
of them had died of hunger, rather than taste a dinner which was not
supplied to them by a properly constituted footman. Admiring their
heroism or pitying their incapacity, Hüber, at last, gave them just one
slave between them all. The plucky little negro, nothing daunted by
the gravity of the situation, set to work at once, dug a small nest,
gathered together the larvæ, helped several pupæ out of the cocoon,
and saved the lives of the surviving slaveowners. Other naturalists
have tried similar experiments, and always with the same result.
The slaveowners will starve in the midst of plenty rather than feed
themselves without attendance. Either they cannot or will not put the
food into their own mouths with their own mandibles.
There are yet other ants, such as the workerless _Anergates_, in which
the degradation of slaveholding has gone yet further. These wretched
creatures are the formican representatives of those Oriental despots
who are no longer even warlike, but are sunk in sloth and luxury, and
pass their lives in eating bang or smoking opium. Once upon a time,
Sir John Lubbock thinks, the ancestors of _Anergates_ were marauding
slaveowners, who attacked and made serfs of other ants. But gradually
they lost not only their arts but even their military prowess, and
were reduced to making war by stealth instead of openly carrying
off their slaves in fair battle. It seems probable that they now
creep into a nest of the far more powerful slave ants, poison or
assassinate the queen, and establish themselves by sheer usurpation in
the queenless nest. “Gradually,” says Sir John Lubbock, “even their
bodily force dwindled away under the enervating influence to which they
had subjected themselves, until they sank to their present degraded
condition—weak in body and mind, few in numbers, and apparently nearly
extinct, the miserable representatives of far superior ancestors,
maintaining a precarious existence as contemptible parasites of their
former slaves.” One may observe in passing, that these wretched
do-nothings cannot have been the ants which Solomon commended to the
favorable consideration of the sluggard; though it is curious that the
text was never pressed into the service of defence for the peculiar
institution by the advocates of slavery in the South, who were always
most anxious to prove the righteousness of their cause by most sure and
certain warranty of Holy Scripture.—_Cornhill Magazine._