Sometimes, after having licked the head and face of its patron, the poor petitioner turns round and proceeds to do the same by its abdomen. This, perhaps, is a last effort of persuasion, but Professor Wheeler rather supposes the surface of _Myrmica’s_ body to be “covered with some agreeable secretion.” Queen _Myrmicas_, however, seem to be very rarely treated to any sort of licking, and males apparently never. The reason of this, probably, is that both queens and males are themselves accustomed to receive their food from the workers by a similar process of regurgitation, and are probably therefore not in the habit of regurgitating it. They are therefore neglected by the little parasites, who console themselves by being all the more insistent with those who have something to give. These—that is to say, the workers—are waylaid whenever they enter the nest, as having presumably found something to eat outside it, and, in order to be on the spot, at once their importunate lickers, who seem to live in a perpetual state of crying, “Give! give!” keep in the more or less immediate proximity of the entrance, or entrances, should there be more than one. Professor Wheeler, indeed, doubts if the _Leptos_ ever feed themselves in the ordinary way, but inasmuch as they were on one occasion seen by him to do so, such doubt appears to me to be uncalled for. These little ants make, in regard to the big ones within whose nest they live, a sort of _imperium in imperio_. In a small chamber surrounded by the large galleries of the _Myrmicas_, and communicating with these by a passage too narrow for the latter to pass through, lives the queen with a small number of workers; eight of them in the nest observed by Professor Wheeler, together with a few larvæ, almost filling the cavity. They appear to be on affectionate terms with one another, the workers feeding their queen in the most assiduous manner, and she often playing with them like a cat with her kittens, throwing them on to their backs, and then “hugging and kissing them” (as Professor Wheeler describes it) _con amore_. Not that the Professor himself takes this view of it, for after hesitating whether to ascribe such behaviour to maternal affection, “the play instinct,” or hunger, he decides for the latter—on what grounds, since there was a continual passage of viands from one ant to another, the queen especially being “assiduously fed,” I am unable to see. What, too, is “the play instinct,” except a mere term made use of in order to suggest the idea of automatism in regard to an act which hardly seems to admit of such an interpretation? Instincts represent imperious necessities which, if not attended to, the species must fail or perish. Such, at any rate, are the grounds on which they must be supposed to have been originally built up. But what creature has had to play in order to survive? Not ants, surely, who work so hard that they cannot stand in need of more exercise than their daily life affords them.