killed upon the spot. A single grave was quickly dug, and they were all dropped into it.” “Prodigious!” as Dominie Sampson would have said, and certainly I think this is one of the most remarkable observations upon ants that has ever been made. As far as the burying is concerned, it has been corroborated by the Rev. W. Farrar White, who, at the same time, corroborates Pliny; but how strange are all the circumstances! What was it, one wonders, that made just a few of the crowd shirk their share of the labour—for this is not like ants. Some strange, uncanny feeling in connection with the dead bodies may be suspected; but seeing that, as the Russian proverb truly says, “Another man’s soul is darkness,” it is not very likely that we shall ever know what ants feel. One interesting question is suggested in this connection, though I have never known it raised yet. Two views of what ants are, excluding compromises, may be taken—the automatic one, tempered with “psychic plasticity,” of Professor Wheeler, and that formed by Mr. Belt, who, having fully satisfied himself—from the keenest observation, be it remembered—of their reasoning powers and capacities, remarks, “When we see these intelligent insects dwelling together in orderly communities of many thousands of individuals, their social instincts developed to a high degree of perfection, making their marches with the regularity of disciplined troops, showing ingenuity in the crossing of difficult places, assisting each other in danger, defending their nests at the risk of their own lives, communicating information rapidly to a great distance, making a regular division of work, the whole community taking charge of the rearing of the young, and all imbued with the strongest sense of industry, each individual labouring not for itself alone, but for all its fellows, we may imagine that Sir Thomas More’s description of Utopia might have been applied with greater justice to such a community than to any human society.”[85] Now, if Belt’s view be the correct one, or if the evidence in favour of it be at all strong, is it not time for us to ask ourselves, merely as a moral problem, how far we, in our clumsy and imperfect human state, have a right to kill ants and tumble Utopia to pieces, simply for our amusement, intellectual or otherwise? Ought we to do this? Or ought we, like a lady who lives in America and writes to very scientific papers, to imprison queens who do no harm, and make ourselves learned at the expense of one, or both of their antennæ, during the term of their natural lives? However simply and sweetly we may talk of this, however much true womanly feeling may enter into the narrative, nay, even though we give the queens pet names, is it really right? ----- Footnote 74: Romanes, Animal Intelligence, pp. 106-107. Footnote 75: The American Naturalist, February, 1902. Footnote 76: The Cambridge Natural History, vol. 6. Footnote 77: