This passage is full of humor, and the humor is slightly mingled with a comical anger and self-irony. There is a fine theory excellent in every respect worked out in all its details by the Professor and now he finds a few trifles of facts which possess the impudence not to adapt themselves to the theory. “_Gott besser’s_,” sighs Noiré, for it is not his fault that the ants accomplish things which they ought not to, and the good Lord is called upon to adapt nature with more rigidity to the Professor’s theories. Is there not an obvious reason why ants stand so high in their performances? Are not ants social beings, more so than any other animal? We are ignorant still of all their means of communication. But that they have some means of communication seems to be an established fact. When ants from different hills but of the same kind give each other battle, it happens not unfrequently that a warrior attacks another warrior of the same people most fiercely, but both let go as soon as they touch each other with their feelers.[13] I refrain from telling stories about the life of these wonderful creatures partly because one well-authenticated report is sufficient for our purpose and partly because I must suppose that most of my readers are familiar with the facts as presented by Darwin, Lubbock, Forel, Huber, and many others. I will add only one observation which is so far as I know undisputed. If ants of a special kind rob the larvæ of another kind and educate them as their slaves, the slaves will in case of war or danger stand by their masters even against their own folks. They evidently speak the language of the hill in which they have been raised. Professor Forel successfully made the experiment, with the assistance of ant-nurses, of raising together several kinds of ants from the larvæ of hostile species. The ferocious Amazons and the Sanguineæ did not show any enmity toward their comrades of the Pratensis and Rufa. When set at liberty and transferred to a new residence they remained together and behaved exactly as if they naturally belonged together. And this experiment may be quoted to corroborate the proposition of Prof. Max. Müller that “thought is thicker than blood.”[14] Now it would be a desperate case for Professor Noiré to maintain his theory in the face of these facts, if by language we have to understand vocal signs only. Yet the idea of his and also of Prof. Max Müller’s theory consists in the truth that thoughts cannot walk about like ghosts in bodiless nudity: they are a system of notation. As such they are symbolised in signs and are inseparable from their signs. These signs are sounds with men, and by words we understand usually sound-symbols. But there are other systems of notation besides vocal signs and they are for that reason not less language than speech. We have reason to believe that ants are in possession of symbolical signs and that most of them are communicated through their feelers.