THE ant has been so thoroughly exploited by Sir John Lubbock and others, that it is altogether unnecessary to enter upon any description of its customs and habits. It may at once be assumed that, for its size, it is the most intelligent of all created beings. Were each particle of the brain of man animated by a vigour and sagacity equal to that which vivifies the tiny speck of brain matter in the head of an ant, imagination altogether fails to picture the result, or to appreciate even faintly the wisdom and power that man would in that case possess. But even as matters stand, we may with advantage learn much from the ant, especially from the more highly organised tropical varieties, in which we may include the termite, popularly known as the white ant, although in reality belonging to another family. Here we see regular communities dwelling together, governed by their own laws and customs, and exhibiting the spectacle of a nation acting in accordance with natural laws. It must be painful to republicans to find that in the great majority of communities of what we are pleased to consider inferior creatures, the monarchical principle distinctly prevails. In ants, bees, and wasps, the most completely organised of such communities, there is a natural head, not elected or chosen by vote, but born to the purple. Among animals that congregate for mutual protection and convenience, such as horses, stags, and elephants, there is always a leader; but in this case he assumes the position by right of superior strength, valour, and sagacity. No scientific man has been able to discover in his election to the post any trace of the process known in the United States as lobbying. There is neither intriguing nor currying for popular favour—the strongest and bravest assumes the position by right of his strength and bravery, and may be termed a natural dictator. These communities are evidently inferior in order and perfection to those of the first class.

Thirdly, come creatures of duller brain, of which the sheep may be taken as a type. And here we come to nature’s example of a republic, the dull level of equality and fraternity, where none are superior to others, and there is no emulation, no gradation of rank, and no rising of one individual above the rest. One cannot doubt, with these examples before us, that Nature has very clearly pointed out that in all highly organised communities the monarchical system is that best adapted for securing order and progress, and for the general benefit of the whole; that for those in a less advanced stage of progress a dictatorship is the preferable form of government, while among those of the lowest type of intelligence a republic serves the purpose as well as any other system.

In the ant nation, which stands at the head of such communities, the monarchical principle is carried out to the fullest extent. We have the Queen, the ruler and mother of the whole; her courtiers, who attend upon her; the military class, who may be considered as the nobles, who do not labour personally, but furnish the fighting and are ready to die in defence of their country. The overseers, generally larger and more intelligent than the mass of workers, direct the operations, chastise the indolent, see that all is done with order and regularity, and generally supervise and control the operations. These may be taken as the type of the middle class, the merchants and manufacturers. Then there are the nurses, who take charge of the eggs, feed the young, transport the pupÆ into the sun, and carry them back into the recesses of the city when rain threatens; while below them are the bulk of the community, the labourers and masons, the huntsmen, and the cowherds who tend the insects from whom the ants obtain a supply of natural honey. Lastly, there are the slave population, captives in war, who are the servants of the whole community. The result of this perfect combination of labour is the erection of edifices, by the side of which man’s greatest efforts are in comparison utterly dwarfed and puny.

One reason of the great success of the ant communities, and of the perfect order and regularity with which they conduct their operations, is that strikes and labour combinations are unknown to them, and all classes are content to do their allotted work contentedly, willingly, and zealously. It must be painful to members of peace societies to know that they are warlike in the extreme, and that among them the principles of universal brotherhood have made absolutely no progress. The bravest knight of the days of early romance, riding out to attack the giants, was but a poor creature by the side of the warrior ant, who will do battle fearlessly with the largest and strongest animal that may venture to disturb the peace of his city, and, having once fixed his hold upon his foe, will suffer himself to be torn limb from limb without relaxing his grasp. Advantage is taken of this extraordinary tenacity of grip by some primitive peoples, who, if suffering from severe cuts, draw the edges of the wound together and then apply ants, who fix their jaws one on each side of the cut. The bodies of the insects are then nipped off, but the heads retain their grip, and form a perfect suture until the wound is completely healed.

Well it is for man that the scheme of Nature did not bestow upon the ant bulk as well as wisdom, valour, and industry. Had the ant been only of the size of the domestic cat, he would have been absolutely Lord of Creation. The fishes alone would survive. A single ant hill would furnish an army infinitely more numerous and formidable than the hosts of Tamerlane or Attila. The earth would shake under their tread; forests would fall before the power of their jaws; the elephant himself would be unable to resist their onset. Even now all smaller animals fly in terror at the approach of an ant army, and if overtaken fall victims to their furious assaults. Such an army, were the individuals no larger than mice, would yet be irresistible. Among the many reasons man has for gratitude to Providence, not the least is that the ant was not endowed with bulk in addition to its other gifts. To attain to the full power of its intellect, it requires a warm climate, differing in this respect from man, who suffers intellectually both from the extremes of heat and cold. The ant of temperate regions bears the same relation to the tropical ant that the savage of the tropical zone bears to the civilised communities of more temperate climes. The ant of the villa garden and the red ant of the woods are but very ignorant savages compared with the termite, for while the one inhabits caves and tunnels in the ground, and the other rough huts, thatched with the spines of the fir, the white ant dwells in a palace far larger in proportion to its size than the abodes of the most powerful monarchs of the human race to that of their inhabitants.

It is not only man who may with advantage take lessons from the ant; the domestic hen would do well in one respect to imitate it. The white ant lays eighty-six thousand eggs a day throughout the season—an amount that may well cause the hen to be ashamed of her miserable total of three or four eggs a week. It is by no means improbable that the partiality of all birds for the pupÆ of ants is less due to a gastronomic liking for them, than to spite at the superior fecundity of the ant. There would be a great future opened to the farmer if our scientific men could but discover some method of producing a bird which would be a combination of the domestic hen with the ant, uniting the size and tranquil habits of the one with something of the fecundity of the other. We should not demand the full tale of eighty thousand eggs a day; but even were that amount divided by a thousand, the result would still be satisfactory. The collection and packing of the eggs would furnish employment to the juvenile rural population, and eggs would become the commonest and cheapest of all diets. There is a book already in existence that gives instructions for cooking eggs in a hundred different ways. Doubtless many fresh methods would be discovered in preparing the abundant and nourishing food that would be thus placed at the service of humanity. There would be the additional advantage, that the problem, now so much mooted, of our raising eggs sufficient for our consumption without dependence upon foreign sources, would be in this way finally solved. Whether such a much-to-be-desired consummation is to be arrived at by the inoculation of the hen with the blood of the female white ant, or by some other method, is a point that must be left to scientific men. It is only necessary for us to indicate a subject of research towards which their studies and investigations may be directed, with the certainty that, if successful, they would be of real utility to the human race.