are the habits and manners of the harvesting ants, the
species which Solomon seems to have had specially in view when he
advised his hearers to go to the ant--a piece of advice which I have
also adopted as the title of the present article, though I by no means
intend thereby to insinuate that the readers of this volume ought
properly to be classed as sluggards. These industrious little creatures
abound in India: they are so small that it takes eight or ten of them to
carry a single grain of wheat or barley; and yet they will patiently
drag along their big burden for five hundred or a thousand yards to the
door of their formicary. To prevent the grain from germinating, they
bite off the embryo root--a piece of animal intelligence outdone by
another species of ant, which actually allows the process of budding to
begin, so as to produce sugar, as in malting. After the last
thunderstorms of the monsoon the little proprietors bring up all the
grain from their granaries to dry in the tropical sunshine. The quantity
of grain stored up by the harvesting ants is often so large that the
hair-splitting Jewish casuists of the Mishna have seriously discussed
the question whether it belongs to the landowner or may lawfully be
appropriated by the gleaners. 'They do not appear,' says Sir John
Lubbock, 'to have considered the rights of the ants.' Indeed our duty
towards insects is a question which seems hitherto to have escaped the
notice of all moral philosophers. Even Mr. Herbert Spencer, the prophet
of individualism, has never taken exception to our gross disregard of
the proprietary rights of bees in their honey, or of silkworms in their
cocoons. There are signs, however, that the obtuse human conscience is
awakening in this respect; for when Dr. Loew suggested to bee-keepers
the desirability of testing the commercial value of honey-ants, as
rivals to the bee, Dr. McCook replied that 'the sentiment against the
use of honey thus taken from living insects, which is worthy of all
respect, would not be easily overcome.'

There are no harvesting ants in Northern Europe, though they extend as
far as Syria, Italy, and the Riviera, in which latter station I have
often observed them busily working. What most careless observers take
for grain in the nests of English ants are of course really the cocoons
of the pupae. For many years, therefore, entomologists were under the
impression that Solomon had fallen into this popular error, and that
w