CREATION BY EVOLUTION
statements we may turn to a study of the ants, which form one among a great many sources of inferences in support of evolution.
As a group, the ants are not so favorable for a study of evolution as their cousins the bees and wasps, because they constitute an unusually compact and homogeneous natural family and one which seems to have completed or nearly completed its evolution at an earlier date in geological time. This difference is indicated by the fact that all the six thousand or more known species, subspecies, and varieties of ants are eminently social, or live in organized colonies, whereas most of the wasps and bees are still solitary insects. There are also other reasons, which will be given later, for believing that the ants arose from a very ancient wasp-like stock and attained their present relatively high specialization a long time ago. We may now review some of the inferences derived from the study of their palaeontology, morphology, distribution, taxonomy, and ethology, which all agree in indicating not only that the ants have been subject to evolution but that this evolution has been of a particular character or pattern.
Many ants have been preserved in a fossil state in formations of Tertiary age, but none have yet been found in earlier formations. A small number of species have been found in Eocene deposits, which were laid down at the beginning of Tertiary time, but a much greater number have been collected from amber (a kind of resin) of Lower Oligocene age, found near the Baltic Sea, and from Miocene shales in Europe and in the United States, at Florissant, near Pike’s Peak, Colo. Several species of ants have been found in Sicilian amber which is also of Miocene age. I have studied no less than 10,000 specimens from the Baltic amber and at least 8,000 from the Florissant shales. Many of those in
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