For what does this Association stand? What are these classical interests that you represent? Take a familiar simile. By a very simple trick, you remember, did Empedocles give Menippus in the moon-halt--the first stage of his memorable trip--such long and clear vision that he saw the tribes of men like a nest of ants, a seething mass going to and fro at their different tasks. Of the function of the classical members in this myrmecic community there can be no question. Neither warriors, nor slaves, nor neuters, you live in a well-protected social environment, heretofore free from enemies, and have been well taken care of. I hate to speak of you as larvæ, but as such you perform a duty of the greatest import in this trophidium stage of your existence. Let me explain. From earliest days much attention has been paid by naturalists to the incredible affection "--incredible [Greek: storgê]," Swammerdam calls it--which ants display in feeding, licking, and attending the larvæ. Disturb a nest, and the chief care is to take them to a place of safety. This attention is what our symphilic community--to use a biological term--bestows on you. So intensely altruistic, apparently, is this behaviour, that for the very word "[Greek: storgê]," which expresses the tenderest of all feelings, there is a difficulty in finding an equivalent; indeed, Gilbert White used it almost as an English word. The truth is really very different. It has been shown that the nursing function--or instinct--is really trophallactic. In the case of the ant the nurse places the larva on its back, and the broad ventral surface serves as a trough for the food, often predigested. The skill and devotion with which this is done are among the wonders in the life of the insect to which moralists have never tired of urging a visit. But listen to the sequel! The larva is provided with a pair of rich honey-bags in the shape of salivary glands, big exudatoria from which is discharged an ambrosia greedily lapped up by the nurse, who with this considers herself well paid for her care. In the same manner, when the assiduous V.A.D. wasp distributes food to the larvæ, the heads of which eagerly protrude from their cells, she must be paid by a draught of nectar from their exudatoria, while if it is not forthcoming the wasp seizes the head of the larva in her mandibles and jams it back into its cell and compels it to pay up. The lazy males will play the same game and even steal the much-sought liquid without any compensatory gift of nourishment.[7] [7] Professor Wheeler in _Proceedings of Amer. Phil. Soc._, vol. LVII, no. 4, 1918.