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ON THE

BEAUTIES, HARMONIES, AND SUBLIMITIES

OF

NATURE.

CHAPTER II.

ANTS.

WITH bees we may associate ANTS,—so variously treated of by Lewenhoek, Swammerdam, Linnæus, Geoffrey de Geer, Bonnet, Latreille, and Huber. ANTS, like bees, are divided into males, females, and neuter; or rather females, who, being barren, from their sexual organs not being developed, are labourers for the benefit of the entire community. Like those of bees, the males and females of ants seem to have no other duties, than just to live and to procreate. The barren ones provide food, construct the habitations, nurture the young, and guard the citadel.

In building they exhibit much ingenuity; every one seeming "to follow his own fancy." Both the male and the female have wings; and when the heat has arisen to a certain height, they issue from their habitations, escorted by the labourers, who offer them food during the first stage of

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their emigration. Then the males and females take flight, during which the act of fecundation is frequently performing. When the females are impregnated, the males are left to themselves; and being unprovided with food, and incapable of procuring it, they soon die of want; while the females pursue their course to some little distance, and seek out habitations; where, finding themselves destitute of labourers, they begin to work, in order to procure food for themselves.

Those few females, which remain behind in the immediate neighbourhood, having been impregnated in their nests, are forcibly taken back by the labourers, who deprive them of their wings, feed them, and attend them till they have deposited their eggs. Ants are totally unacquainted with the economy of hoarding. They are almost entirely carnivorous; living upon other insects, and portions of other animal substances; and on the nutritious juices of gall insects and kermes; also on exudations from several species of the aphis, which the labourers take home for the males and females, that do not work. This secretion of the aphis is supposed to be destined, not only for its own subsistence, but for that of ants for the aphis is always in the neighbourhood of ant colonies; and they become torpid precisely at the same temperature. Some species of ants even collect the eggs of the aphis, and bestow upon them the same care, they do upon those of their own species. They also construct habitations for them, at a small distance from their own nests; where they go to them, and rob them of their secretions, whenever they are in want. These secretions the aphis yields with the same willingness and docility, that sheep and cows give down their milk.

Ants have parental and filial affections; friendly dispositions and social sympathies; and when any of the impreg

The flights of ants are sometimes very wonderful: De Foe records one over his lands and neighbourhood, vol. iv. 377. 379.

nated females die, they lick their bodies for several days, and pay them all manner of attention, as if they thought they could restore them to life. But to balance these moral perfections, they wage war not only against other insects, but small quadrupeds; and, like bees, against communities of their own species. Some species of ants even carry on war for the sake of making slaves of their enemies. These ants, whom Huber calls Amazons, live in nests; in which also reside an inferior species of ant, who do for them all the domestic services they require. At a certain season of the year these Amazons quit their nests in great numbers, in search of those nests, which contain that species of ant, which they have left behind. When they find, a battle ensues. The Amazons almost always conquer; when they enter the nests of those they have subdued, rob them of all their eggs and larvæ, which they take to their own habitations, and breed up to maturity; when they become slaves, as it were, to the other ants, who never work; performing, as before observed, every species of domestic service; viz. that of building, nourishing the young ones, and providing food. In one important particular these slaves are singularly fortunate. They perform all their duties with the greatest willingness and activity; and appear to love their masters, as if they were ants of their own species.

This description of the manners of ants, so curious in itself, and so opposed to the generally-received opiniona, that, like bees, they hoard up for the winter, is founded on the patient researches of Mons. Huber', of Geneva. In respect to the aphis, it is curious to remark, that though females are produced every season, males are produced only once in ten years. Both of them are found on stems, leaves, and * Parvula magni formica laboris

Ore trahit quodcunque potest, atque addit acervo

Quem struit, haud ignara ac non incauta futuri.-Hor. Sat. i. 1. 33.

b Vide Recherches sur les Mœurs des Fourmis indigènes, par P. Huber. Paris, 1810.

roots of trees and plants; and the females are exceedingly prolific. When the males arrive at full maturity, they copulate with the females; which copulation, as Trembley suggested, many years since, has been found by Bonnet and Richardson to last for ten seasons. On the tenth season a

b

a

few males are produced; and these males, copulating with the females, lay the foundation for a new series. Gnats propagate five seasons, without any communication with the male. At the sixth they require impregnation again.

Huber conceives that ants chiefly communicate with each other by signs and the sense of touch. Fallow ants emigrate in a curious manner: for they are led by a guide, who takes precedence, carrying an ant in its mouth. When it has fixed upon a spot it likes, both ants return to the nest, when each takes up an ant, and returns to the selected spot. Then all four revisit the parent nest; and return in a similar manner. So that in a short time the whole, or that part of the nest, which purposes emigration, remove into the spot, selected by the first guide.

"M. Bonnet received a vine-fretter at the time of its birth, and reared it alone. It produced young without having had any opportunity of connexion with another of its species; and one of the young, being sequestered in like manner, produced a new generation; so that Bonnet obtained no less than five successive generations, without the aid of a male, in the short space of five weeks. He went on, and got a seventh, and even a ninth, generation in the course of the summer. He concluded that these successive generations were produced in the first mother by the male, which had impregnated in autumn the egg, from which she came forth in the following spring: 'for it is very remarkable, that the vine-fretter, which is viviparous in summer, becomes oviparous in autumn."-St. Pierre, Harmonies, ii. 167.

b Vide Philo. Trans. vol. xi. art. 22.

с The younger Huber gives ants a species of language; and he thinks that the Aphides and Gall insects, upon which the ants depend for a considerable portion of their food, understand the antennal language as well as themselves. How curiously does this agree with what Origen says in his discourse against Celsus! Lib. iv. 181.

"When they meet one another, they converse together; hence it is they never lose their way. They are endowed with reason in all its degrees; they have the use of speech, and the knowledge of accidental things."

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