One knows that the red ants make war on the black ants and steal their nymphs, who, retained in captivity, make them excellent domestics, attentive and obedient. White humanity also, at one point in its history, found itself faced with a like opportunity, but less prudent than the red ant, it let it pass, from sentimentalism, thus betraying its destiny, renouncing, under Christian inspiration, the complete and logical development of its civilization. Is it not amusing that slavery is presented to us as anti-natural, when it is on the contrary, normal and excessively natural to the most intelligent of animals? And in an order of ideas more closely related to the subject of this book, if the making neuter of a part of the population, placing them in castes vowed to continence, is an anti-natural attempt, how is it that social hymenoptera, ants, bees, bumble-bees, and termites among neuroptera, have managed it so well, and have made it the basis of their social state? Doubtless there is nothing like it among animals; but mammals, apart from man, that monster, even including beavers, are infinitely inferior to insects. If the habits of social birds (for there are such) were better known, one might find analogous practices among them. The sexual co-operation of all the members of a people being useless so far as the conservation of the race is concerned; and on the other hand inferior species living as neighbours to a superior species being destined to disappear, slavery is good for the inferiors as it assures them perpetuity and a sort of evolution suited to their feebleness. A little brown ant, the anergates, having no workers establishes itself as parasite in an ant-hill and gets itself served by workers of another species in order to live. What ingenuity of the sexed, what docility of the sexless! The worker ants are clearly degenerate females, among whom sexual sensibility has been completely transformed into maternal sensibility. One observes, moreover, in many species an intermediate type of woman-worker, who gives the key to this evolution. One should note that after fecundation the females do not all re-enter the city; where they fall, they build, as mother-bumble-bees, a provisory nest, acting then like workers, and await the first egg-laying, which will produce exclusively real workers and will thereby permit the normal construction of the new ant-hill. There are among ants, as among butterflies, hermaphrodites along the medial line, or sometimes along an oblique line: this gives absurd creatures, half one thing, half the other, or singularities such as a female with a worker's had who functions as a worker.[2]