By RUTH WARD KAHN.
Astronomy has made us all familiar with the conception of the world
over our heads. We no longer speculate with Epicurus and Anaxagoras
whether the sun may be as large as a quoit, or even as large as
Peloponnesus. We are satisfied that the greater and the lesser lights
are worlds, some of them greatly exceeding our own in magnitude.
In a little poem of Dante Rossetti's, he describes a mood of violent
grief in which, sitting with his head bowed between his knees, he
unconsciously eyes the wood spurge growing at his feet, till from
those terrible moments he carries away the one trivial fact cut into
his brain for all time, that "the wood spurge has a cup of three." In
some such mood of troubled thought, flung perhaps full length on the
turf, have we not as unconsciously and intently watched a little ant,
trudging across our prostrate form, intent upon its glorious polity: a
creature to which we, with our great spiritual world of thought and
emotion and will, have no existence except as a sudden and
inconvenient upheaval of parti-colored earth to be scaled, of unknown
geological formation, but wholly worthless as having no bearing upon
the one great end of their life--the care of larvæ.
If we hold with Mr. Wallace that the chief difference between man and
the lower animals is that of kind and not of degree--that man is
possessed of an intelligent will that appoints its own ends, of a
conscience that imposes upon him a "categorical imperative," of
spiritual faculties that apprehend and worship the invisible--yet we
must admit that his lower animal nature, which forms, as it, were, the
platform of the spiritual, is built up of lower organisms.
If we hold with Professor Allman that thought, will, and conscience,
though only manifesting themselves through the medium of cerebral
protoplasm, are not its properties any more than the invisible earth
elements which lie beyond the violet are the property of the medium
which, by altering their refrangibility, makes them its own--then the
study of the exact nature and properties of the transmitting medium is
equally necessary. Indeed, the whole position can only be finally
established of defining experimentally the necessary limitation of the
medium, and proving the inefficiency of the lower data to account with
the higher.
It is these considerations of the wider issues that give such a
peculiar interest to the patient observations which have recently been
brought to bear upon the habits of the social insects, especially of
ants, which, living in communities, present so many of the conditions
of human life, and the development of the "tribal self" from these
conditions, to which Professor Clifford attributed the genesis of
moral sense.
In order to pass in review these interesting observations and bring
out their significance, I must go over ground which is doubtless
familiar to most of my readers.
The winged ants, which often excite surprise, are simply the virgin
queens and the males. They are entirely dependent upon the workers,
and are reared in the same nest. September is the month usually
selected as the marriage season, and in the early twilight of a warm
day the air will be dark with the winged lovers. After the wedding
trip the female tears off her wings--partly by pulling, but mostly by
contortions of her body--for her life under ground would render wings
not only unnecessary, but cumbersome; while the male is not exposed to
the danger of being eaten by his cannibal spouse, as among spiders,
nor to be set upon and assassinated by infuriated spinsters, as among
bees, but drags out a precarious existence for a few days, and then
either dies or is devoured by insectivorous insects. There is reason
to believe that some females are fertilized before leaving the nest. I
have observed flights of the common _Formica rufa_, in which the
females flew away solitary and to great distances before they
descended. In such cases it is certain that they were fertilized
before their flight.
When a fertilized queen starts a colony it proceeds much in this way:
When a shaft has been sunk deep enough to insure safety, or a
sheltered position secured underneath the trunk of a tree or a stone,
the queen in due time deposits her first eggs, which are carefully
reared and nourished. The first brood consists wholly of workers, and
numbers between twenty-five and forty in some species, but is smaller
in others. The mother ant seeks food for herself and her young till
the initial brood are matured, when they take up the burden of life,
supply the rapidly increasing family with food, as well as the mother
ant, enlarge the quarters, share in the necessary duties, and, in
short, become the _real_ workers of the nest before they are scarcely
out of the shell. The mother ant is seldom allowed to peer beyond her
dark quarters, and then only in company with her body guard. She is
fed and cared for by the workers, and she in turn assists them in the
rearing of the young, and has even been known to give her strength for
the extension of the formicary grounds. Several queens often exist in
one nest, and I have seen workers drag newly fertilized queens into a
formicary to enlarge their resources. As needs be, the quantity of
eggs laid is very great, for the loss of life in the ranks of the
workers is very large; few survive the season of their hatching,
although queens have been known to live eight years. (Lubbock.)
The ant life has four well marked periods: First, the egg; second, the
grub or larva; third, the chrysalis or pupa; fourth, the imago, or
perfect insect. The eggs are small, ovate, yellowish white objects,
which hatch in about fifteen to thirty days. The larvæ are small
legless grubs, quite large at the apex of the abdomen and tapering
toward the head. Both eggs and pupa are incessantly watched and
tended, licked and fed, and carried to a place of safety in time of
danger. The larvæ are ingeniously sorted as regards age and size, and
are never mixed. The larvæ period generally extends through a month,
although often much longer, and in most species when the larvæ pass
into pupæ they spin a cocoon of white or straw color, looking much
like a shining pebble. Other larvæ do not spin a cocoon, but spend the
pupal state naked. When they mature they are carefully assisted from
their shells by the workers, which also assist in unfolding and
smoothing out the legs. The whole life of the formicary centers upon
the young, which proves they have reached a degree of civilization
unknown even in some forms of higher life.
It is curious that, notwithstanding the labor of so many excellent
observers, and though ants swarm in every field and wood, we should
find so much difficulty in the history of these insects, and that so
much obscurity should rest upon some of their habits. Forel and
Ebrard, after repeated observations, maintain that in no single
instance has an isolated female been known to bring her young to
maturity. This is in direct contradiction to Lubbock's theory, who
repeatedly tried introducing a new fertile queen into another nest of
_Lasius flavus_, and always with the result that the workers became
very excited and killed her, even though in one case the nest was
without a queen. Of the other kinds, he isolated two pairs of _Myrmica
ruginodis_, and, though the males died, the queens lived and brought
their offspring to perfection; and nearly a year after their
captivity, Sir John Lubbock watched the first young workers carrying
the larvæ about, thereby proving the accuracy of Huber's statement,
with some species at least. In spite of this convincing testimony,
Lepeletier St. Fargeau is of the opinion that the nests originate with
a solitary queen, as was first given.
The ants indigenous to Leadville, besides feeding on small flies,
insects, and caterpillars--the carcasses of which they may be seen
dragging to their nests--show the greatest avidity for sweet liquids.
They are capable of absorbing large quantities, which they disgorge
into the mouths of their companions. In winter time, when the ants are
nearly torpid and do not require much nourishment, two or three ants
told off as foragers are sufficient to provide for the whole nest. We
all know how ants keep their herds in the shape of aphides, or ant
cows, which supply them with the sweet liquid they exude. I have often
observed an ant gently stroking the back of an aphide with its antennæ
to coax it to give down its sweet fluid, much in the same way as a
dairy maid would induce a cow to give down its milk by a gentle
manipulation of its udders. Some species, principally the masons and
miners, remove their aphides to plants in the immediate vicinity of
their nest, or even introduce them into the ant home. In the interior
of most nests is also found the small blind beetle (_Claviger_)
glistening, and of a uniform red, its mouth of so singular a
conformation that it is incapable of feeding itself. The ants
carefully feed these poor dependent creatures, and in turn lick the
sweet liquid which they secrete and exude. These little _Coleoptera_
are only found in the nests of some species; when introduced into the
nests of others they excite great bewilderment, and, after having been
carefully turned over and examined, are killed in a short time as a
useless commodity. Another active species of _Coleoptera_, of the
family _Staphylini_, is also found in ant nests. I have discovered one
in the nest of _Formica rufa_ in the Jewish cemetery in Leadville.
Furnished with wings, it does not remain in the nest, but is forced to
return thither by the strange incapacity to feed itself. Like the
_Claviger_, it repays its kind nurses by the sweet liquid it exudes,
and which is retained by a tuft of hair on either side of the abdomen
beneath the wings, which the creature lifts in order that the ant may
get at its honeyed recompense. Such mutual services between creatures
in no way allied is a most curious fact in the animal world.--_Popular
Science News._
* * * * *