ellow ants carried the winter eggs of a species
of aphis into their nest, and there took great care of them. In the
spring, the eggs hatched out; and the ants actually carried the young
aphides out of the nest again, and placed them on the leaves of a daisy
growing in the immediate neighbourhood. They then built up a wall of
earth over and round them. The aphides went on in their usual lazy
fashion throughout the summer, and in October they laid another lot of
eggs, precisely like those of the preceding autumn. This case, as the
practised observer himself remarks, is an instance of prudence
unexampled, perhaps, in the animal kingdom, outside man. 'The eggs are
laid early in October on the food-plant of the insect. They are of no
direct use to the ants; yet they are not left where they are laid,
exposed to the severity of the weather and to innumerable dangers, but
brought into their nests by the ants, and tended by them with the utmost
care through the long winter months until the following March, when the
young ones are brought out again and placed on the young shoots of the
daisy.' Mr. White of Stonehouse has also noted an exactly similar
instance of formican providence.

The connection between so many ants and so many species of the aphides
being so close and intimate, it does not seem extravagant to suppose
that the honey-tubes in their existing advanced form at least may be due
to the deliberate selective action of these tiny insect-breeders.
Indeed, when we consider that there are certain species of beetles which
have never been found anywhere except in ants' nests, it appears highly
probable that these domesticated forms have been produced by the ants
themselves, exactly as the dog, the sheep, and the cow, in their
existing types, have been produced by deliberate human selection. If
this be so, then there is nothing very out-of-the-way in the idea that
the ants have also produced the honey-tubes of aphides by their long
selective action. It must be remembered that ants, in point of
antiquity, date back, under one form or another, no doubt to a very
remote period of geological time. Their immense variety of genera and
species (over a thousand distinct kinds are known) show them to be a
very ancient family, or else they would not have had time to be
specially modified in such a wonderful multiformity of ways. Even as
long ago as the time when the tertiary deposits of Oeningen and
Radoboj were laid down, Dr. Heer of