The Cecil Whig. [volume] (Elkton, Md.) 1841-current, 1875-07-31
OUR SIX LEGGED RIVALS.
From the Scientific american.

From the Scientific american.
1t is remarkable circumstance that those
creatures which mimic man most nearly in
mental and social development should be
not his nearest allies among the vertebrates,
but members of an entirely different order.
1t is something more than remarkable that
they should stand to their order-the artc-
ulata-precisely in the same relation that
man bears to the order with which he is
classed.
Though surpassed in every detail of phys
ical accomplishment his subordinates man
nevertheless excels them all in intellectual
power and capacity for self-improvement.
Similarly our six-legged rivals, though the
least of the articulates, are first in grade
of development, surprising the next below
them-the bees and the wasps-as man sur
passes the lower mammalia. This in itself
is not surprising; but it does surprise one
to see them excelling the higher vertebrates
also, and pressing hard upon mans prerog-
ative.
Accustomed to find brain power asso-
ciated with and measurably related to brain
bulk, it is simply astounding to discover a
few microscopic specks of nerve pulp-the
ants cerebral ganglia-harboring degree
of intelligence such as the infinitely more
bulky brain Of man alone gives evidence of.
We have printed good deal of late in
A. oc -,
interesting creatures, and think the facts
will warrant the position we have taken.
The question is not one of difference be-
tween undev eloped reason and high order
of instinct, but of difference between in
stinct and instinct, reason and reason. In
the first, which we are too apt to consider
an attribute peculiar to the lower forms of
life, the ant might possibly be accounted
our superior. But ants also reason, profit
by experience, make judicious use of new
means for the accomplishing of new ends
or the overcoming of new obstacles, and in
many ways exhibit a degree of quick wit
tedness and intelligence which we may look
long for among many tribes CT man.
The completeness and complexity of the
social organization of ant communities, the
magnitude and variety of the works which
they plan and execute, the perfection of
their military and industrial discipline, the
evident scope and flexibility of their lam
guage, their sympathetic regard for each
other in times of distress or danger, their
r
brated by every observer of insects from
Solomon to Belt; and the more they are
studied the more do their various civiliza-
tions and the motives which animate the
members surprise and delight US.
Now we see them roaming about as indie
pendent warriors or hunters-formic Ish-
maelites or Indians-ierce, vindictive, self
reliant, and marvelously fertile in tricks
,Snd traps for the securing of their prey.
vain they appear in organized armies,
nom adic swarms without settled habitation,
like the Tartar hordes of Gengis Khan,
marching, from conquest to conquest, sweep
ing all before them. Others are pastoral in
their habits and more or less permanent IN
their habitations. In temperate -fSeglons
they rear and maintain, on suitable plants,
herds of honey yielding aphides and bee
ties, which they tend with assiduous care,
transporting them from pasture to pasture,
and defending them from their enemies
and the clements as zealously as the shep-
herd does his sheep; in the tropics the same
kind offices are performed for domesticated
scale insects and leafhoppers, in return for
the honeylike secretions they emit. Some
constitute themselves standing armies for
the defense of plants which yield them sub
sistance directly or by affording pasturage
for their cattle. Others are a scourge to
plant life, gathering leaves by wholesale to
make hot beds for the cultivation of fungi
in underground chambers.
The harvest ant-which provideth her
meat in the Summer and gathereth her food
in the harvest-has been proverbial for
thrifty wisdom, certainly since Solomon
commended her ways to the sluggard: how
much longer, we have no means of telling.
Had the wise man enlarged upon the way
some of her kind have learned to secure
plenty without labor by the enslaving of
others-the raiding ants of our correspond
ent in Arkansas are probably given to the
practice-his advice would doubtless have
been more highly appreciated by lazy hui
manity, too many of whom have hit upon
the same expedient without the help of rev.
elation.
But wiser than the common harvesting
ants are the agricultural ants of Western
Texas-the only Simon Pure and original
Grangers-who have solved the transporta-
ton problem, by bringing not the grain but
the grain fields to market. They have
learned-possibly through the gradual de-
siccation of that now almost desert region
that chance productions are but a plecari-
GUS support in a climate like theirs, so they
surround their communities with fields of
rich grass, which they protect by killing all
rival growths, and in due season harvest
their crops, doing all by we'll timed and con,
certed labor. Could there be happier
iiIuooi abiOh Vi tHdG IOcdl StdIc VI OISdIlZcQ
industry and mutual helpfulness, which
philosophers have dreamed of and enthu-
siasts labored for since Plato planned his
Republic? AS in Sir Thomas Moore's ITO
pa (reading ant for NAM, every ant has a
right to every thing; and they do know
that if care is taken to keep the public
stores full, no private ant can want any
thing, for among them there is no unequal
distribution, SO that no ant is poor or in
any necessity; and though no ant has any
thing, yet they are all rich.
We have seen how all the common attri-
butes of mankind are mimicked by these
six-legged rivals of ours, to a degree unap-
preached by any other class of animals.
But man, we are told, has faculty higher
than thrift, higher than fellow feeling,
higher even than reason. 1t is the faculty
of reverence, the basis of religion, whether
manifested in the fetichism of the Fantee
or the faith of the Christian This the
theologians are wont to declare is shared
Il