about the manners and habits of these blind marauders. They
cross rivers, the West African gossips declare, by a number of devoted
individuals flinging themselves first into the water as a living bridge,
like so many six-legged Marcus Curtiuses, while over their drowning
bodies the heedless remainder march in safety to the other side. If the
story is not true, it is at least well invented; for the
ant-commonwealth everywhere carries to the extremest pitch the old Roman
doctrine of the absolute subjection of the individual to the State. So
exactly is this the case that in some species there are a few large,
overgrown, lazy ants in each nest, which do no work themselves, but
accompany the workers on their expeditions; and the sole use of these
idle mouths seems to be to attract the attention of birds and other
enemies, and so distract it from the useful workers, the mainstay of the
entire community. It is almost as though an army, marching against a
tribe of cannibals, were to place itself in the centre of a hollow
square formed of all the fattest people in the country, whose fine
condition and fitness for killing might immediately engross the
attention of the hungry enemy. Ants, in fact, have, for the most part,
already reached the goal set before us as a delightful one by most
current schools of socialist philosophers, in which the individual is
absolutely sacrificed in every way to the needs of the community.

The most absurdly human, however, among all the tricks and habits of
ants are their well known cattle-farming and slaveholding instincts.
Everybody has heard, of course, how they keep the common rose-blight as
milch cows, and suck from them the sweet honey-dew. But everybody,
probably, does not yet know the large number of insects which they herd
in one form or another as domesticated animals. Man has, at most, some
twenty or thirty such, including cows, sheep, horses, donkeys, camels,
llamas, alpacas, reindeer, dogs, cats, canaries, pigs, fowl, ducks,
geese, turkeys, and silkworms. But ants have hundreds and hundreds, some
of them kept obviously for purposes of food; others apparently as pets;
and yet others again, as has been plausibly suggested, by reason of
superstition or as objects of worship. There is a curious blind beetle
which inhabits ants' nests, and is so absolutely dependent upon its
hosts for support that it has even lost the power of feeding itself. It
never quits the nest, but the ants bring it in