The Secret Life: Being the Book of a HereticBisland, Elizabeth
Philosophy
The Secret Life: Being the Book of a Heretic
Bisland, Elizabeth
Diaries
We have seen that Huxley admits reluctantly that most animals have
those portions of brain development that we believe to be the seat
of consciousness, but here is an insect with organs and functions as
heterogeneous from our own as can well be imagined, and yet there is no
mode of life that men have tried which one or another of the races of
ants is not pursuing to-day. Beside the agriculturists and herdsmen,
some keep slaves to do everything for them, some live by hunting
and plunder, while others quarter themselves upon us and live by
confounding meum and tuum. Any ardent pomologist may study the herdsmen
tribes by simply turning over the leaves of his young apple tree in
the spring. Upon the broad succulent meadows of the under side of his
foliage he will discover fat flocks of aphis cows, tended by brawny ant
cow-herds, who keep a special eye upon the big brown bulls around which
the cows and calves gather to feed. The herdsmen conduct them from leaf
to leaf as they exhaust the sap, and at night by the long twig paths
and barky roads they carry the milk of the sweet honey dew with which
they are swollen. If the horticulturist be hard of heart and smear away
a whole herd with a sweep of his thumb, the horrified herdsmen will
rush frantically home, bursting into the nest to report to some hyksos
king of the termites, that the Philistines have fallen upon his charge
and that "I, only I, have escaped to tell the tale!"
The most interesting of the agricultural races of ants is that one
commonly known in the West Indies as the parasol ant, from its fashion
of carrying bits of flower petals over its shoulder at the angle
commonly used with a sunshade. This ant erects an enormous structure,
as large in proportion to its size as is the City of London to any
one of its inhabitants. The dwellers in these cities are divided into
classes: farmers, road-makers, explorers, nurses, soldiers, street
sweepers, policemen, and, of course, the Queen. The great town is kept
perfectly clean and sanitary by the scavengers, who remove all refuse
every day. In case of death the bodies are removed some distance and
buried. The soldiers guard the entrances to the city, and in case of
attack by one of the Attila hordes of the barbarian hunter ants, they
fight with a fury and courage so great that only after the entire army
is destroyed is the city ever given up to pillage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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