exterminated, fighting literally to the last ant. Where a colony is unmolested it increases rapidly in population, and undertakes to lay out roads: one of these, from two to three inches in width, has been traced to a distance of 100 yards from the city. These ants are not very carnivorous, nor do they damage the crops of neighboring farmers. Persons who intrude upon the "pavement" are bitten with great zeal, but otherwise the species may be regarded as harmless. One creature alone they seem to tolerate on their "pavement"—the so-called small black "erratic" ant—which, as Dr. Lincecum conjectures, may be of some use to them, and which is therefore allowed to build its small cities in their immediate neighborhood. If it becomes too numerous, however, it is got rid of, not by open war, but by a course of systematic and yet apparently unintentional annoyance. The agricultural ants suddenly find that it is necessary to raise their pavement and enlarge the base of their city. In carrying out these alterations they literally bury the nests of their neighbors under heaps of the small pellets of soil thrown up by the prairie earth-worms, and continue this process till the erratic ants in sheer despair remove to a quieter spot.
Concerning the government either of the agricultural ants or of other species, our knowledge is of a very negative character. The queens, or rather mothers, of the city are indeed treated with great attention, but their number is quite indefinite, and, unlike female hive-bees, no jealousy exists between them. How their migrations, their wars, their slave-hunts, are decided on, or even how the guards on duty are appointed, and the visiting parties selected who go round to inspect the works, and who sometimes insist on the destruction and rebuilding of any badly-executed portion, we are utterly ignorant. The outer manifestations of ant-life we have to some extent traced; but its inner springs, its directing and controlling powers, have eluded our observation.
It has been remarked, in the Quarterly Journal of Science, that ants, unlike man, have solved the problem of the practical organization of communism: this is literally true. In a formicary we can detect no trace of private property; the territory, the buildings, the stores, the booty, exist equally for the benefit of all. Every ant has its wants supplied, and each in turn is prepared to work or to fight for the community as zealously as if the benefit of such toil and peril were to accrue to itself alone. If the principle—so common among men—that there is no harm in robbing or defrauding a municipal body, or the nation at large, crops up in an ant-hill at all, it must evidently be stamped out with an old-fashioned promptitude. But, to understand why the ant has succeeded where man has failed, we must turn to certain fundamental distinctions between human and ant society; or, perhaps, speaking more generally, between the associations of vertebrate and those of annulose animals. A human tribe or na-
