INSECT CIVILISATION.
THE newer natural science is to some extent bewildering in more ways than one. We have heard so much lately of the ques- tion concerning the origin of man, that far more curious matters have been thrown into the shade, matters which might affect, not perhaps our view of revelation, but our general view of the universe, still more seriously. The latest inquiries into the habits of the lower animals has elicited the evidence of a degree of complexity in the social institutions of some classes of animals which suggests that certain characteristics which we suppose to be purely human, might belong to tribes of animals for which we have never been accus- tomed to entertain much respect. Not long ago, in an article on the intellectual powers of birds, we referred to the curious evidence, which Mr. Darwin has quoted at length in his work on the origin of man, as to the gay social meetings, the elaborately decorated rendezvous, and the graceful dances, of the Bower birds; and now we have Sir John Lubbock, in the learned little book* which he has just published on the origin and metamorphoses of insects, suggesting that possibly some kinds of ants may have a religious feeling towards a certain species of beetle, and that if that be not the case, they may at least be credited with having a much larger number of domesticated animals than human beings. We will quote the whole passage in which this notion is thrown out :— "Ants are very fond of the honey-dew which is formed by the Aphides, and have been seen to tap the Aphides with their antenna; as if to induce them to emit some of the sweet secretion. There is a species of Aphis which lives on the roots of grass, and some ants collect these into their nests, keeping them, in fact, just as we do cows. One species of red ant does no work for itself, but makes slaves of a black kind, which then do everything for their masters. Ants also keep a variety of beetles and other insects in their nests. That they have some reason for this seems clear, because they readily attack any unwelcome intruder ; but what that reason is, we do not yet know. If these insects are to be regarded as the domestic animals of the ants, then we must admit that the ants possess more domestic animals than we do. But it has not been shown that the beetles pro- duce any secretion of use to the ants ; and yet there are some remark- able species, rarely, if ever, found, excepting in ants' nests, which are blind and apparently helpless, and which the ants tend with much care. M. Lespes, who regards these blind beetles as true domestic animals, has recorded some interesting observations on the relations between one of them (Claviger Duvalii) and the ants (Lasius niger) with which it lives. This species of Claviger is never met with except in ants' nests, though, on the other hand, there are many communities of Lasius which possess none of these beetles ; and M. Lespes found that when he placed Clavigers in a nest of ants which had none of their own, the beetles were immediately killed and eaten, the ants themselves being, on the other hand, kindly received by other communities of the same species. He concludes from these observations that some communities of ants are more advanced in civilisation than others: the suggestion is no doubt ingenious, and the fact curiously resembles the experience of navigators who have endeavoured to introduce domestic animals among barbarous tribes ; but Ai. Lespes has not yet, so far as I am aware, published the details of his observations, without which it is impossible to form a decided opinion. I have sometimes wondered whether the ants have any feeling of reverence for these beetles; but the whole subject is as yet very obscure, and would well repay careful study."
Perhaps we may assume that Sir John Lubbock is having a quiet joke at the expense of the clergy, when he suggests that perhaps a special reverence may be felt by. the ants for a blind species of beetle, otherwise useless to it and helpless, which it never- theless "tends with great care,"—in other words, we suppose, that the ants may look upon the blind beetles as domestic chaplains, or even perhaps as idols which have power to bring good or bad fortune on the families which tend them. But M. Lespe-s, whom he quotes, is evidently serious in thinking that certain tribes of the black ant are as much more civilised than other tribes of the same insect as certain races of men are than savages ; and Sir John Lubbock, too, is evidently serious when he remarks that the conduct of the barbarous ants in killing and eating the beetles which the more civilised so carefully tend, curiously resembles the conduct of savages in killing and eating the cows or sheep which navigators introduce among them for the sake of the milk and wool, but in which savages can see nothing but an immediate supply of food. If one of the more polite ants themselves be intro- • On the Origin and metamorphoses of Insects. By Sir John Lubbock, Bart London: Macmillan and Co. dnced into the nests of the less civilised, its species is at once respected, and it is received with such hospitality as rude races generally showed to wandering Europeans till taught by experience to fear their unscrupulous ways ; but if one of the beetles which the better educated ants have, say, domes- ticated, be thus introduced, instead of being treated with any- thing of the same respect, it is at once treated just as savages treat our imported cows or sheep, or even horses,—as material for the butcher's shop,—without any appreciation of the more refined uses to which it may be put. Even this less subtle suggestion as to the varying degrees of civilisation attained by various tribes of ants, opens up a rather startling field of speculation. If there be insects possessing a larger number of domestic animals than man has pressed into his service, and yet if this be not a mere matter of instinct, but of acquired art, to which even other tribes of the very same species of ant have not yet attained, then there may be progress, there may be discovery, there may be inventive genius and investigation among the ants,—just as there may be artistic genius, something in the nature of the creative power which makes a salon delightful, amongst the birds whose elaborate entertainments Mr. Gould has described for us. But if so, then there must be also ants of master minds, there must be what some deep-hearted mystic among the ante, some Carlylian ant of the race Lasi us ;dyer, might call heroes, and declare to be worthy of hero-worship. The ant which first discovered that aphides might be kept and milked, if such an ant there were, must have been a patriarch worthy of historic fame. Even the red ant which first introduced slavery, though we might call him worse than a Jefferson Davis among ante, would have been a great hero to the Carlylian ant aforesaid, and would very likely have been hymned by him as having deserved the gratitude of the enslaved ant, black Quashee, himself, as well as of the whole tribe of red ants who were exempted from toil and enabled to devote their learned leisure to more liberal pursuits, by the discovery. Nay, there might even be a Toussaint L'Ouver- ture among the black ants, to liberate them from the service of the red, and in his turn to be seized and imprisoned by the white ants. Nay, seriously, if there be real progress among ants of any race, if there be tribes of Lasius niger which have domesti- cated more kinds of insects than man has domesticated of other animals, and which have consciously improved on their ancestors in this respect, it would be impossible to deny that there must have been discoverers and reformers amongst them, and that it was not instinct, but intellect which made them so. Nor is this suggestion limited to any one region of the animal world. A French savant the other day declared that the swallows of Rouen had improved on the architecture of the ordinary swallow, by making what may be called balconies for their young ones to sit upon and breathe the air more freely before they are able to fly, and though it is possible that such cases may be explained by the mere automatic action of Mr. Darwin's principle that a useful variation, though in some sense accidental at first, will always tend to per- petuate itself, that is not a principle which it is quite easy to apply to so elaborate an institution as the domestication of a blind beetle, or an aphis in the capacity of milch cow, or to the artistic social amusements of the Bower birds, as quoted by Mr. Darwin from Mr. Gould. It seems to be now really contemplated as at least possible by our naturalists that among several of the least powerful species of animals, insects certainly included, there has been at one time at all events, real progress, progress in the nature of a utilised discovery either beneficial or delightful to the whole race.
Now if this were to be ever established in relation to any one of the more insignificant animals, what a new feeling of moral embarrassment it would add to life to think that at any moment, by a careless tread, or an accident of the plough, we might be putting a term to the life of a great reformer in one of the regions of life too minute for any intelligent communication between our world and its,—that the prospects of a great race of ants, for instance, had been suddenly blighted by the untimely slaughter not merely of a "village Hampden" or an "inglorious Milton" amongst ants, but, far worse, of an active and notable personage who was leading the way in new investigation, or the new organisation of discoveries already made? In that case it might even be possible that the blind and help- less beetles are tended, neither from any feeling of superstition, nor for the sake of any service that they render to the ants who tend them, but only as a recognition of the duty of com- passion towards a perfectly helpless tribe,—that in fact, this tending of the beetles is of the nature of a home or orphanage for beetles, and that the ant who began the custom was a sort of Lord Shaftesbury among ants, instead of, as Sir John Lubbock
hints; a- kind of Ignatius Loyola, instituting a grim cultns of superstition. If that were the case, imagine the sense of dismay with which we should reflect that by any step of which we were supremely unconscious we might have put a tragic end to a great and philanthropic career,—a career marked by the first recognition amongst insects of the principle that there should be some moral limit put upon the cruel "conflict for existence " ! The ant which,—without language, we suppose,—had anticipated Shake- speare's thought that,—
" The poor beetle that we tread upon In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies,"
—and had done more than Shakespeare, had made the thought the foundation of a domestic institution, for the humane (or rather formican) treatment of beetles, might yet be slain without the dimmest knowledge of it on our part, by some carelessly flung stones And surely this would be a still more painful supposition than the Arabian superstition that, in flinging nutshells about, you might chance to wound an invisible gdnie in the eye. There would be something almost intolerable in the thought that the most unquestionable moral and intellectual advances were being made in a world not indeed abso- lutely invisible to us, but still so inaccessible to us in general, that we could not by any possibility take account of what was going on in it in our ordinary procedure,—that we might be murdering a whole army of industrial captains whenever we pulled up a tree, and blighting the intellectual or social prospects of a progressive race whenever we rode over an ant-hill. Yet much that we hear now-a-days compels the conjecture that there may be a degree of conscious life and knowledge, not quite impossibly even of moral sympathy, in some of the most insignificant, as regards size, of all our fellow-creatures. Yet there is, unquestionably, something very paralysing to the imagination in the notion of all this possible world of wisdom in a mite or a water-drop, a world as much beyond our recognition as if it were infinitely above our apprehen- sion. It is as if a clumsy Titan might ruin all the civilisation of our earth by a tap of his fist, or even break up the earth itself by a stumble. Did such an accident to our world seem really probable, we should soon learn to make light of studies of which our hold was so precarious ; and it is; therefore, nearly impossible for us to attribute sincerely to any minute world, liable thus to be ruined by our blunderings, the kind of conscious progress and growing civilisation which are sometimes half-humorously ascribed to its inhabitants by the observers of insect life. Struggle as we may, we cannot divide the idea of conscious progress, even in mere social organisation, from a moral significance which would render it impossible to believe that any superior race could overthrow it by mere clumsiness. In other words, we cannot separate conscious wisdom, even in the administration of an empire of ants, from its source in the conscious wisdom which guides that greater universe, of which we are ourselves minute parts, and cannot therefore believe that anything so great as true intellectual or moral progress can be liable to constant destruction at the hands of creatures at once capable of sympathy with it, and yet, quite ignorant of what they are destroying. It would be as easy to think that the solitary wasp, which, according to Sir John Lubbock, has "the instinct" of stinging the, prey destined to be the food of its young, directly they are hatched, in the centre of the nervous system, so as to render them helpless, and yet not to kill them,—(for if they were to die, they would be decomposed before the young wasp needed them for food),—acts on scientific surgical principles, as to attribute the con- scious life of discovery and of economic administration to creatures so much the sport of accidents as the ants. We know that human advance is liable to no really arbitrary catastrophes of this kind, and we can hardly doubt that any similar progress even in a world beneath our own, would be equally safe from it. Even an atheist could hardly be found who would consent to believe that art, intellect, and nobility greater than ours are constantly succumb- ing to our idlest whims,—so deeply ingrained is the faith in a moral providence, even in those who reject the faith in God. And we hold that the deep incredulity with which even the most serious naturalists obviously treat their own very plausible conjectures as to the grander possibilities of the infinitely little' worlds into the affairs of which they inquire so acutely, is but the profound testimony of their hearts and consciences to the providence which guarantees a certain real durability to all the higher stages of in- tellectual and moral life. As far as we can see, but for this ineradicable faith, nothing would be more plausible than to credit the ant with a sort of Roman faculty for insect organisation and enipire ; and if the effort to do so is a mere sign of humour,
which it is impossible to regard as serious, we take it that the ex- planation is, not that the facts commented on forbid the inference, but that our knowledge of the subordinate and dependent place which these creatures hold in-our world is inconsistent with any durability in the moral and intelleotual issues to which they would on that hypothesis have attained, and that we are compelled to believe in such durability by a faith deeper than any power of observation. It is an invincible belief in Providence which makes even naturalists regard rather as a paradox of fancy, than as a scientific inference, the intellectual and moral qualities which certain phenomena would otherwise legitimately suggest as belong- ing.to several insect tribes.
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