food and supply it by
putting the nourishment actually into its mouth. But the beetle, in
return, seems to secrete a sweet liquid (or it may even be a stimulant
like beer, or a narcotic like tobacco) in a tuft of hairs near the
bottom of the hard wing-cases, and the ants often lick this tuft with
every appearance of satisfaction and enjoyment. In this case, and in
many others, there can be no doubt that the insects are kept for the
sake of food or some other advantage yielded by them.

But there are other instances of insects which haunt ants' nests, which
it is far harder to account for on any hypothesis save that of
superstitious veneration. There is a little weevil that runs about by
hundreds in the galleries of English ants, in and out among the free
citizens, making itself quite at home in their streets and public
places, but as little noticed by the ants themselves as dogs are in our
own cities. Then, again, there is a white woodlouse, something like the
common little armadillo, but blind from having lived so long
underground, which walks up and down the lanes and alleys of antdom,
without ever holding any communication of any sort with its hosts and
neighbours. In neither case has Sir John Lubbock ever seen an ant take
the slightest notice of the presence of these strange fellow-lodgers.
'One might almost imagine,' he says, 'that they had the cap of
invisibility.' Yet it is quite clear that the ants deliberately sanction
the residence of the weevils and woodlice in their nests, for any
unauthorised intruder would immediately be set upon and massacred
outright.

Sir John Lubbock suggests that they may perhaps be tolerated as
scavengers: or, again, it is possible that they may prey upon the eggs
or larvae of some of the parasites to whose attacks the ants are subject.
In the first case, their use would be similar to that of the wild dogs
in Constantinople or the common black John-crow vultures in tropical
America: in the second case, they would be about equivalent to our own
cats or to the hedgehog often put in farmhouse kitchens to keep down
cockroaches.

The crowning glory of owning slaves, which many philosophic Americans
(before the war) showed to be the highest and noblest function of the
most advanced humanity, has been attained by more than one variety of
anthood. Our great English horse-ant is a moderate slaveholder; but the
big red ant of Southern Europe carries the domestic institution many
steps fur