The Sins and Splendours of Antdom
The Guests of British Ants. By H. St. J. K. Donisthorpe. (Routledge. 18s. ) The Ant People. By Hans Heinz Ewers. Translated from the German by C. H. Levy. (John Lane. 8s. 6d.) Mn. Dornsmoaen's deeply interesting book both requires and deserves a more profound study than we can give it here. It is beautifully illustrated and represents many decades of !earning and patient research. To the scientist it will prove invaluable and the layman also will find it of use in supplementing or confirming information he has acquired from other sources : to him it will serve rather as a work of reference than as a book to be read straight through. If we confine our attention chiefly to the more popular work reviewed below, it is only because Dr. Ewers has given us the more tractable material : otherwise no comparison is possible. Mr. Donisthorpe shuns fantasy and sticks to facts. Dr. Ewers does just the reverse ; if he enlightens the general public he will probably shock the scientists. However, it is with the public we are concerned, and until lately few people outside myrmeccflogical circles knew much about the life and daily labours of Antdom. It is a • kingdom quite outside that of man : as Dr. Ewers justly observes, the ant is neither good to eat, nor beautiful to look at, nor even funny or useful—" for these reasons, .man has taken little notice of ants, a condition that satisfies -them very well," since the interest of humanity in the creatures which . it assumes to be made for its convenience is rarely pleasant for its object. Yet here are whole worlds of feminists, heroes, architects, slave-owners, parasites, conquerors, living out their social experiments on a scale in which we can study their results as a whole, with the same kind of comprehension (neither more nor less) that some colossal god might bring to our affairs if they came under his observation. Every new book about ants, provided it is at all accurate, should contain a moral for mankind.
From hunters to shepherds to agriculturists, we may trace the evolution of the ants. Among them we may still had primitive and warlike races, like the Bull-dog ants of Australia, which are an inch in length and can jump up as high as a man's knee to sting him ; pastoral peoples, who keep leaf-lice and other animals, milking them regularly ; tillers of the soil and harvesters ; and ants that ply the shuttle and distaff. "Only among men and ants," says the author, "do we find a complete series of artistic powers. In Antdom we have spinners, carpenters, paper-makers, roofers, hunters, farmers, bakers, miners, herds, coopers, plasterers, mushroom-growers, tapestry-makers, gardeners, cutlers, nurses, governesses, sick-nurses, soldiers, scouts, guards ; there are professional slave-holders, thieves, robbers, loafers. Of course mankind has some others, but among the ants there are callings not known to man ; for instance, the profession of the Living Door among the Carpenter ants, or the Living Cask among the Honey ants, both quite as strange to man as the Compulsory Regicide."
The Honey ants, who live in countries where droughts are frequent, have followed the great social rule of Antdom that mankind is now adopting (division of labour) to such an extent that one class of worker has specialized on developing her stomach until it has grown so big that she can no longer move. She hangs, then, from the roof of her home, a mere bag of mead, a great communal crop-stomach, whose other organs have atrophied from disuse, until death releases her from her martyrdom and she falls to the floor. From earliest infancy she has been chosen for the sacrifice, she is fattened like a Moorish bride until the hour comes for her dedication, and is then led to the honey cellar and becomes a Living Cask.
From time to time she lets a few drops pass from her public to her private stomach, but only just enough to keep her alive. She has no business but a continuous clinging to the roof with her feet, which have by now become hooks, to carry the great weight of her casks. She clings thus, in order to ensure the scrupulous cleanliness that all ants insist upon. If the barrels rested on the ground, the cellarers would find difficulty in sweeping. As it is, they are groomed daily. When an ant wants to feed, it goes down to the cellar and opens the mouth of the first cask it comes to and drinks its fill. Then the spigot closes. During the brief period of filling the process is reversed. The honey-gatherers bring the sweet liquid home in their crops and pour it into the willingly opened bung-hole of the Living Casks.
Every ant likes predigested food, and, strange as it may seem to us, the custom is to feed on the kisses of one's sister workers. "The ant gathers considerable food, but needs very little for its own requirements ; so little, that it is always hungry. Its national consciousness is so strong that it reckons itself in terms of the community. Only a portion of the people go in search of food, while the others, with duties highly specialized, attend to the housework. When one of the workers comes home, another ant approaches her, touches her with her feelers, strokes her with her front legs and licks her. They lay tongue to tongue and accompany this friendly -intercourse with tender strokes of feelers and legs. The feeder that comes home with a full crop is not content with feeding one, but passes from one to the other, distributing her gifts with a free hand. And even the others, which have been so tenderly fed, do not retain these gifts for themselves alone. They rim to other hungry sisters and pour forth what they can spare in kisses." Here, then, is Socialism in exceWs. We not only mind our sister's business, but attend to her digestion.
" Humanitarian " work is not neglected, and in eugenics and dietetics Antdom is several thousand years ahead of mankind, for it knows how to breed the type of creature that the State requires by a nice regulation of its early diet. "I have often observed wounded or ill ants," says our author, "nursed back to health by their sisters. These ministrations may last for months. It is true that very severely wounded individuals are seldom nursed ; those whose death is imminent are cast out of the nest. Just so the Spartans exposed their sickly children." More remarkable still, he declares that ants indulge in sport and games. He has seen them play with grains of wheat, or seeds, taking them away from one another, letting them roll, bringing them back. They have boxing and wrestling matches, catching one another withtheir mandibles, and trying all sorts of grips. "It is easy to see that these contests are not in earnest. There are crowds of onlookers, stroking the contestants with their feelers and forelegs, and trilling as they cheer. These games of strength," he suggests, are chiefly indulged in by the housemaids of the nest, who find in them a means of getting the sunshine and fresh air denied them in the domestic round. On even more debatable ground DT. Ewers does not fear to tread. What is the real purpose of the great assemblages of the ant people ? For they do assemble, he declares, both out in the open and in the artificial nest. They gather together suddenly —" then sit still and quiet for many hours at a time. They do not talk to one another, they do not touch one another with their feelers. They move the hinder body slightly, as a dog wags his tail ; they wave their feelers hither and thither, very slowly. It is very striking, if you come to think of it, that there is no animal that works so continuously, with slight intervals for play, as the ant. What then are the workers about now—what is the purpose of their assembly ? Are they consulting about something important to the State ? Are they praying, as men do in their churches ? Are they thanking their Creator that he made them the crown of the insect world ? " Here be thoughts that cannot fail to inculcate that humility before the works of God that the old theology so signally failed to supply. Are we the lords of the Universe, or are there other creatures, suffering, striving, sinning and sometimes seeing the Light, for whom there is a redemption and a revelation, differing from ours only in degree ?
If to err is human, it is also antly. There is a charming beetle (charming, that is, to the ants) whom they love so fondly that they nurse her babies for her. This care of the beetle brood is valuable, except for a trifle. The ants aid their own brood, as well as the alien, bedding the larvae down in the earth in the pupal stage. If a larva has emerged, it is dug up and the pupa is dragged around, first to one chamber, then another" (to keep them at an even temperature). `' This is the best possible procedure for the ant pupae, but it is not so good for the beetle pupae. These long to lie in the
ground and not be bothered. On account of the over-loving care bestowed on them, they perish one after the other. Only a few of the pupae survive to develop into beetles, and these are the ones the ant-nurses have neglected to dig up." If ever the Blood Red ants discover the flaw in their welfare work, it will be an ill day for them, for should all the young of the fatal Fringed Beetle survive, their civilization shall go the way of Nineveh and Tyre. This beetle is an enchantress, whose aureate locks seem to cast a spell upon the susceptible Sanguineae. The Blood Reds are of the highest order of ants, and seem to have acquired some of the vices of an ancient civilization. They are prone to intoxicants, and in addition to its bewitching looks, the Fringed Beetle secretes a liquor that enthralls them. It possesses glands at various places in its body, the openings of which are marked by a hairy growth. From these pores it emits a thin, almost etheric
liquid, which moistens the golden hair and has a most alluring fragrance for the ants. Thirst and desire seem to drive the Blood Reds mad, when these vampires come into their nest. They lose all reason, neglect their own children and the Mother Queen, coddle the Fringed Beetles and their brood, spend their days in fawning on their enchantresses and their nights in drunkenness A strange change comes over the love-sick nest.
"False females" appear, with feminine breasts indeed, but the brains of workers, lazy, pale, cowardly creatures, unlike their once-kingly race. The insatiable beetle larvae absorb the food which should go to their own babies, the doomed State grows weaker and weaker. Drink has been its undoing. Und dass hat ,nit ihren Singen Die Lorelei getan !
The Fringed Beetle is not a murderer, but there is a Louse which is. This Louse is also a Lorelei with golden hair ; her victims are the Long-Necked ants. They follow the witch for the sake of the intoxicating draught she gives them. "One after another they gulp the rapturous liquid, one after the other they fall to the earth swooning with joy." Cautiously then our blonde vampire creeps down, and, seizing the debauched ants as they slumber, sucks their blood.
Of slave-owners, cattle-keepers, the Borgia Queens who rule by murder, and of the shock troops of the Amazons who stop to beautify themselves on the march to battle, we have not space to write. It is a tiny and terrible world into which we have glanced for a few moments, where crime and self-sacrifice, social reform and tyranny, and a hundred other human problems are worked out with astonishing results.
We would not, however, unreservedly commend Dr. Ewers's book ; some of it is controversial and other parts are in poor taste. It has been carelessly translated and is full of Americanisms, yet in spite of this there is much in it that
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