That ants should intentionally cultivate mushrooms will appear wonderful to everybody, and some will see in it the high-water mark of their mental development, by whatever path it has been arrived at. It seems natural to connect such doings with the fact that “in ants the cerebral ganglia are of extraordinary dimensions, and in all the Hymenoptera these ganglia are many times larger than in the less intelligent orders, such as beetles.”[67] Yet the brain of an ant—“one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man”—is “not so large as the quarter of a small pin’s head.”[67] Of what size, then, can a beetle’s be?—especially that family of beetles which grow and cultivate mushrooms, just in the same way that ants do. It would be suggestive—though I hardly know of what—should it be found that, comparatively speaking, _they_ have no brain at all. The beetles alluded to have been named, with reference to the particular kind of mushrooms they grow, ambrosia beetles, though in what the great superiority of these over those raised by the ants lies I do not know, for no one appears to have tasted them. It has been agreed, however, to call them ambrosia. “One of the most remarkable facts,” says Mr. Froggatt, “is that each group of these beetles is associated with a certain kind of ambrosia or fungus, notwithstanding that they are found in different timbers. This substance is actually cultivated by the mother beetle upon a carefully prepared layer or bed of wood-débris, generally at the end of the gallery; but in others the ambrosia is grown only in certain brood chambers of peculiar construction, whilst in others again it is propagated in beds near the cradles of the larvæ!”[68] When the latter hatch, they find a supply of celestial food awaiting them, and can walk about the various galleries, feeding upon it to their hearts’ content.