Sir John Lubbock, last Friday week, continued his observations on
ants in a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, from which we gather that modern ants are not very fall of resouree, —whatever the ants were which first constructed the ante nests,—and are very conservative ; that they will keep to the track by which they have first found their way to food, rather than try a short cut which would shorten it by a great many feet ; that they will go a very long way round, rather than jump the third of an inch or fill up a crevice of that breadth with fine
■ mould provided for them ; that they prefer the priest's and Levite's part to the Samaritan's, not taking the trouble to dig a comrade out of light mould as they pass by on the other side ; that they dis- tinguish between the ants of their own nest and strangers, and that if a mixed group of their own people and strangers are found intoxicated with alcohol, they drop the strangers into water, but carry their own ants home,—though they sometimes make mistaken between the two when found in that humiliating condition ; that they keep standing armies and herds of cows ; and that, like human beings, they are wholly demoralised by the institution of slavery, so that they even forget how to feed themselves. Still they are obviously intellectually nearer us, both in their contd.- vances and the abuses which result from those contrivances, than any other social creature, though they seem not to have any warm insect affection. Clearly, they haye an organised administration,, an army, a civil service, and public nurses. Possibly they have medical ants, and if, as seems certain, they keep tame beetles .ist their nests, as humble companions,—to this Sir John Lubbock. expressly testifies,—it may be that they keep them to experiment on by way of vivisection.
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