In the market-place at Santa Fé, in Mexico, peasant women from the
neighbouring 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-coloured 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 indiarubber 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 volume 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 honours he waived with rare generosity in favour 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
Clarke 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 disembarrassed
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 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 pill-boxes 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 20 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
neighbours. 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 slaveholder; 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 neighbouring 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 favourable 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.