Ants tend their fields, gather their harvests, domesticate other insects, and keep slaves. They help each other bear heavy burdens, extricate each other from misfortune, speak to each other when they meet, and bury their dead. They build roads and bridges, and manifest wonderful engineering skill in their construction. They even tunnel under rivers. They go far from home, and find their way back again. They inhabit towns, and build splendid and spacious palaces. Each ant knows every other citizen of its own town, and an ant from any other town is immediately recognised as a foreigner. Ants have their overseers of industrial enterprises, and regular hours for work and sleep. The ant is the most pugnacious of all animals, and the most muscular compared with its size. It will boldly attack the biggest creature that walks if this creature invades its home. It will fasten its mandibles into an enemy, and allow itself to be torn to pieces without relaxing its hold. Among some savage tribes, certain species of ants are said to be used as surgeons. Infuriated ants are allowed to fasten their mandibles on the opposite edges of a gash, and in this way the wound is closed. The ants are decapitated, and their bodiless heads with their relentless jaws serve as stitches to the wound. Ants have holidays and athletic festivals. On such occasions they romp and chase each other and play hide-and-seek like children. They stand on their hind-legs, embrace each other with their fore-limbs, grasp each other by the feet or antennae, pull each other down the entrances to their towns, wrestle and roll over on the sand, and so on—all in the friendliest manner. It is greatly to the credit of these little people that no observer has ever yet known them to become so inventively helpless or so athletically hard up as to play slug-ball. Ants educate their young, and practise the fundamental principles of human states and societies. Forel, the great Swiss student of ants, says that several hundred nests are sometimes united into a single confederation. Each ant knows every other ant of the entire confederation, and they all take part in the common defence. Haeckel says, speaking of social evolution in ants, that the aboriginal ants of the Chalk Age had as little idea of the division of labour and organisation of modern ant states as paleolithic flint-chippers had of the complexity and organisation of twentieth-century civilisation. ‘If we take an ant’s nest, we not only see that work of every description—rearing of progeny, foraging, building, rearing of aphides, and so on—is performed according to the principles of voluntary mutual aid, but we must also recognise, with Forel, that the fundamental feature of the life of many species of ants is the obligation of every ant to share its food, already swallowed and partly digested, with every member of the community which may apply for it. Two ants belonging to the same