lation, while they retained his remaining moiety
as an available honey-bag: but from this cannibal proceeding
ant-etiquette recoils in decent horror; and the amber globes are 'pulled
up galleries, rolled along rooms, and bowled into the graveyard, along
with the juiceless heads, legs, and other members.' Such fraternal
conduct would be very creditable to the worker honey-ants, were it not
for a horrid doubt insinuated by Dr. McCook that perhaps the insects
don't know they could get at the honey by breaking up the body of their
lamented relative. If so, their apparent disregard of utilitarian
considerations may really be due not to their sentimentality but to
their hopeless stupidity.

The reason why the ants have taken thus to storing honey in the living
bodies of their own fellows is easy enough to understand. They want to
lay up for the future like prudent insects that they are; but they can't
make wax, as the bees do, and they have not yet evolved the purely human
art of pottery. Consequently--happy thought--why not tell off some of
our number to act as jars on behalf of the others? Some of the community
work by going out and gathering honey; they also serve who only stand
and wait--who receive it from the workers, and keep it stored up in
their own capacious indiarubber maws till further notice. So obvious is
this plan for converting ants into animated honey-jars, that several
different kinds of ants in different parts of the world, belonging to
the most widely distinct families, have independently hit upon the very
self-same device. Besides the Mexican species, there is a totally
different Australian honey-ant, and another equally separate in Borneo
and Singapore. This last kind does not store the honey in the hind part
of the body technically known as the abdomen, but in the middle division
which naturalists call the thorax, where it forms a transparent
bladder-like swelling, and makes the creature look as though it were
suffering with an acute attack of dropsy. In any case, the life of a
honey-bearer must be singularly uneventful, not to say dull and
monotonous; but no doubt any small inconvenience in this respect must be
more than compensated for by the glorious consciousness that one is
sacrificing one's own personal comfort for the common good of universal
anthood. Perhaps, however, the ants have not yet reached the Positivist
stage, and may be totally ignorant of the enthusiasm of formicity.

Equally curious