SIR JOHN LUBBOCK ON ANTS.
THE paper by Sir John Lubbock in the March number of the Fortnightly Review, on the habits of ants, is as fascinating as the best of novels, without having anything in it of that highly imaginative character which has too often attached to the observa- tions of naturalists on the habits of creatures so widely separated from us as the insects. Nothing is more difficult than to draw the right inferences from the facts observed as to the habits of such creatures ; indeed, Sir John Lubbock has already shown, we imagine, that many of these inferences are illegitimate, and assume too easily the kind of explanations which would be the true explanations of similar conduct on the part of men, but are not the true explanations in these cases. Sir John Lubbock's reputation as a naturalist is due in great measure to his ingenuity in devising experiments which enable him to compare the conduct of insects under cir- cumstances in all respects but one the same, and to infer accurately, therefore, from the difference (if any) in their conduct, that they are actuated by the circumstance of this par- ticular difference. For instance, the following is a most conclusive experiment, which he tried in order to establish the power of ants to communicate to each other a simple idea. Nothing is more certain than that ants set great store by the larva of ants (whether of their own tribe or not), and'that they Will carry care- fully to their nests any they can find. Sir John Lubbock, there- fore, pat two glassee, the one filled with larva!, (from 300 to 600), and another containing only two or three (of which, however, any one taken away was immediately replaced by another), in positions accessible to an ants' nest, and then put one of the tribe Lulus niger to each glass, noting on her return to the nest how many companions each brought with it ; but all these companions on their arrival at either glass of larv 83 were imprisoned till the end of the experiment, so that they might not, by their return to the nest carrying larvw, betray in which glass the larger number was. The result was that in every case here recorded— (Sir John quotes the total result of all the experiments occupying fifty hours, and the in- dividual result of live of the experiments occupying eight hours, but not, of course, the individual result of every experiment)— the ant visiting the glass with few larvae brought -either no com- panions or very few,—the largest number of companions ever brought by her was three in one hour, in which she herself made ten journeys ; while the one visiting the glue with many larvte never brought less than seven companions in an hour's time, and once brought sixteen companions within that time,--the remarkable fact being that in the hour in which she brought most com- panions, she made the fewest journeys herself, while in the hour in which she brought fewest companions with her she worked singularly hard herself. But the most final of these experiments was the one in which Sir John reversed the glasses, leaving the ant which had, hitherto been engaged on the large heap of larva) with buttwo or three, and the one which had been hitherto engaged, on the small heap with hundreds to work at. And the result was most remarkable. The ant which had previously brought comparatively few com- panions, now brought twenty in the two hours duringwhic' h the ex- periment lasted,—or at the rate of ten in the-hour,—while the other one, which had hitherto brought -many companions with it, though it worked hard itself, brought only one companion throughout the two hours. It is clearly impossible not to infer that each ant while working at the larger heap communicated to its companions in the nest either its greater need of assistance or the greater booty to be had, while the other ant either com- municated its indifference to assistance, or the smallness of the booty to be had. The total result of all the 'experiments was that the ant working at the glass with few larvas, brought in fifty hours only eighty-two friends, or little more than an average of, say, one friend in every thirty-eight minutes, while the other brought 257 companions in the same time, or one friend every twelve minutes. It is hardly conceivable that with so careful a series of experiments such a result could have been acci- dental, especially taking into account the striking result where the heavy job was given to the ant which had previously been working at the light one, and vice verso- On the other hand, we are not quite convinced by the experiment from which Sir John infers that though one ant can communicate a simple . notion of this kind, it cannot communicate &More-complex One— cannot tell another ant the proper way ton store of food which it has discovered. The manner in which‘he satisfiedlimself of this was by placing a store of honey in a glass accessible to the nest, and putting an ant to the honey, but instead of allowing her after her return to show her companions the right way, -he removed her straight to the honey directly she had started on her subsequent journey from the nest, leaving her companions to find their own way if they could,—he had carefully arranged a place where they might go wrong, and could not be kept right by scent alone,— from any directions their friend might have given them. But then why should the ant have even tried to give them directions, when she was herself going to show them the way ? Even a man would hardly tell the right way to his companion, if he intended himself to accompany him. Surely the better course would have been to tether the ant as she set out from the nest on her first return to the honey, and then, observing the same precautions as before, to see whether she could send any of her companions in search of the store she had found. Still though this experiment is not final, it seems probable that the conclusion represents fairly enough the general standard of the ant's intellegence. Sir John Lubbock has shown by another very decisive experiment that though the ants will tunnel through earth to get at food the where- abouts of which they know, they will not make the minutest of embankments to help them to economise their labour in getting at such food ; nor did they even drop food down to the nest from a point directly above it, to save themselves a very long-roundabout journey in bringing it. In a wotd, the modes of engineering to
which, as a race, they have long been accustomed, they will still pursue when necessary. But they seem to devise no variation on them, however slight and easily accomplished, to save their labour. To mslre a passage through mould to a store of food, they will move away numbers of particles of earth which are in the way ; but they will not collect two or three such particles together, in order to make for themselves a raised pathway by which they may get to food above them.
About the same level of intelligence is shown in the experi- ments made by Sir John Lubbock on the power of ants to dis- criminate between friends and strangers, and on their friendliness towards their friends. That they discriminate clearly in the general waybetween friends and strangers,—and this even when the friends have been separated from them for upwards of a year,—SirJohn has clearly proved, but that they are not particularly anxious to go out.of their way to befriend even their friends, he has also shown ; and more than this, he has proved that even in the favour they show to their own companions over strangers, there is a certain in- difference to small mistakes, which appears to indicate that they are acting rather on general political rules than on any principle of per- sonal affection. When Sir John Lubbock chloroformed twenty-five friends and twenty-five strangers, the ants carried out almost all as dead and dropped them into the water,—friends and strangers alike,—and as ants do not recover from chloroform, they were not, so far, wrong. But when instead of chloroforming he intoxicated twenty-five friends and thirty strangers with alcohol, — from which ants do recover,—their procedure was very different. They carried twenty friends into the nest, where they probably recovered, and dropped the other five, as if they were dead, into the water. Of the thirty strangers, they dropped twenty-four into the water, and took six into the nest, but brought out four again and dropped them also into the water, so that while only two strangers were retained in the nest, only five friends were put out of the way after the fashion in which twenty-eight out of the thirty strangers had been disposed of. Were these two strangers, we wonder, distinguished strangers, whom they wanted to honour, or to keep as hostages, or to send back as ambassadors? And were the five friends 7rutuvais sujets, whom they were glad of an excuse for getting rid of ? Or was it the case, as is more probable, that, dealing somewhat carelessly with the matter, as a mere matter of business, they confounded friends with strangers in one or two instances, just as in a town-and- gown affray one or two gownsmen might be mistaken for so many townsmen ? There is a good deal which seems to show that ants are rather political than personal in their principles of action. Cover one of their citizens with mould, and numbers of them will pass him by on the other aide, though a very little labour would disinter him. On the other hand, where a good many citizens are collectively affected, a policy has to be adopted. It need not be a very delicately discriminating policy, still it must be a policy,—and though mistakes are made in the individual details, it is efficiently carried out.
On the whole, Sir John Lubbock's experiments and observa- tions seem to show that the world of ants, while a very industrious, very prudent, and in some respects, a very highly and economic- ally organised world, is rather a world ruled by averages, in which what has been called "the individuality of the individual" is not of much account. There is clear economy of labour. Sir John Lubbock has shown that in the time of comparative tor- pidity, when there are no larvm to be fed, two or three ants do the foraging for a whole nest, coming out usually about twice a day. If these foragers were imprisoned, then an equal number were sent out in their places by the community at home ; and so again, if these last were imprisoned. Again, one of the experi- ments we have detailed, shows that an ant which has found more larvae than it can carry home itself, conveys in some way to its comrades that it needs help to transport them. A still higher economical instinct is shown in the care the ants take to preserve and hatch the eggs of the aphides on whose honeydew they live ;—in,s, word, they do just what a poultry-keeper does, a feat beydnd the foresight of many tribes of human savages. Again, besides keeping such stock-farms, they seem to have dependents,--especially blind beetles and blind wood-lice,- which they keep possibly as a caste of scavengers, to remove what they find deleterious, possibly as a caste of minstrels to amuse them. (Sir John Lubbock finds ants to be quite indifferent to any sounds he can make, but he shows that they have an elaborate apparatus which looks very like an auditory apparatus, and conjectures that they may be very sensitive to vibrations which our ears do not perceive at all.) Then, too, some ante have carried the division of labour so far, that the fighting ants (the Amazons
or Polyergus rufescens) can do nothing except fight,—cannot even feed themselves, much less clean the nests and manage the young, and are wholly dependent on a different tribe, whose pupa they plunder in order to provide themselves with slaves. In one case, qubted by Sir John Lubbock from M. Ford, ant-organisation had been carried so far that a sort of ant-empire had been created, containing within a circle whose radius was two hundred yards, no less than two hundred colonies of the species Formica exsecta,—an empire which must have con- tained at least a population of ants equal to the human population of the British Islands. Indeed, Sir John Lubbock ventures to suggest that if the life of the individual ant were longer,—he supposes it to be from one to two years,—and if they could accumulate the lessons of their experience,—a great "if,"— they would, from their enormous numbers, contend on equal terms with man even in temperate regions, and probably on much more advantageous terms within the tropics.
Hence, though the old advice to the sluggard to go to the ant to learn industry might evidently be enlarged upon, and the learned doctors of capitalism and trades-unionism might be sent to the ant to learn economy also, the most instructive lesson which these wonderful communities seem likely to teach us is this, that the modern sceptic's idea of ethics, which makes ethical progress to consist in the gradual, unconscious subordination of the good of the individual to the good of the community, has been most effectually tried among the various tribes and nations of ants, and the economy in which it results carried out to a far higher perfection than it ever can be with men,—but only to prove that individuality, and the affections which foster individuality, are the most essential of conditions for the accumulation of experience. And yet the effect of experience on mere organisation is far greater, and far more rapidly accumulated, through the hereditary modification of the instincts of a creature of very short span of life like the ant, than it can be through the instincts of a being with as long an infancy as man's. Of course the more generations are possible within a given time, the more chance there is that beneficial modifications of an organism will perpetuate themselves. And yet in the cleverest of the short-lived creatures, this process proves to be indefinitely inferior in power to the accumulation of experience through conscious individual effort. Surely the inference is clear that it is not by naturally differentiated organisations, but only by the individual self-culture of consciously free beings, that the accumulation of experience in any large or moral sense becomes really possible.
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