There are three casts of ants, or four if one count, the division of neuters into workers and fighters, as among termites. Here, as with bees, the neuters are the base of the republic, the males die after mating, the females after laying. "There are," says M. Janet (_Recherches sur l'anatomie de la fourmi_) "workers so different from the others, in the development of their mandibles and the largeness of their heads that one calls them soldiers, a name according with the rôle they fill in the colony." These soldiers are also butchers, who cut up prey which is too large or dangerous. Specialization is the only superiority of the neuters who for the rest seem inferior to the females and to the males in size, muscling and visual organs. The females are sometimes half as large again as the neuters, the males being between the two sizes. The ant shows much more intelligence than the bee. Before this tiny people one seems really to touch humanity. Consider that the ants have slaves, and domestic animals. First the plant lice, preferably those who live on roots, and, at need, those of the rose-bush, who are milked, and who permit it, subjected by long heredity. _Aphis formicarum vacca_, says Linnæus briefly (beetle the ants' cow). But wandering herds are not enough for them, they keep in the interior of their ant-hills, colonies of slave plant-lice, of domesticated staphylins. The staphylins are small coleoptera with mobile abdomen, one of their species is only found among ants. They are domesticated to the point of no longer being able to feed themselves: the ants stuff the necessary food into their mouths. In return the staphylins furnish their masters a revenue analogous to that which they get from the plant-lice: from the bunch of hairs rising at the base of their abdomen they seem to exude a delectable liquor, at least one sees the ants suck these hairs with great eagerness. These animals permit it. They are so much at home, that the same observer (Muller, traduit par Brullé, _dans le Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle de Guérin, au mot Pselaphiens_) has seen them coupling without fear in the midst of the busy ant people, the male hunched on the back of the female, solidly crammed against the mellifluous tuft of ant's delicacies.