to receive the young captives and to
welcome them--children of their own race, doomed to be bond-servants in
a strange land.

Here, then, was a miniature city, in which strong red ants lived in
peace with small black ones. But what was the province of the latter?
Huber soon discovered that, in fact, these did all the work. They alone
were able to build the houses in which both races lived; they alone
brought up the young red ants and the captives of their own species;
they alone gathered the supplies of food, and waited upon and fed their
big masters, who were glad to have their little waiters feed them so
attentively.

The masters themselves had no occupation except that of war. When not
raiding some village of the blacks, the red soldiers did nothing but
wander lazily about.

Huber wanted to learn what would be the result if the red ants found
themselves without servants. Would the big creatures know how to supply
their own needs? He put a few of the red insects in a glass case, having
some honey in a corner. They did not go near it. They did not know
enough to feed themselves. Some of them died of starvation, with food
before them. Then he put into the case one black ant. It went straight
to the honey, and with it fed its big, starving, silly masters. Here was
a wonder, truly!

The little blacks exert in many things a moral force whose signs are
plainly visible. For example, those tiny wise creatures will not give
permission to any of the great red ones to go out alone. Nor are these
at liberty to go out even in a body, if their small helpers fear a
storm, or if the day is far advanced. When a raid proves fruitless, the
soldiers coming back without any living booty are forbidden by the
blacks to enter the city, and are ordered to attack some other village.

Not wishing to rely entirely on his own conclusions, Huber asked one of
the great naturalists of Switzerland, Jurine, to decide whether or not
mistakes had been made regarding these customs of the ants. This
witness, and indeed others, found that Huber's reports were true.

"Yet, after all," says Huber, "I still doubted. But on a later day I
again saw in the park of Fontainebleau, near Paris, the same workings of
ant life and wisdom. A well-known naturalist was with me then, and his
conclusions were the same as mine.

"It was half-past four in the afternoon of a very warm day. From a pile
of stones there came forth a column of about five hundred reddish an