In the early days of the Spanish conquest, Buenos Ayres, which is now a large and beautiful city, the capital of the Argentine Republic, was only a small town, with a fort and some soldiers to guard it, and in the year 1536 it was besieged by the Indians, so that, the provisions being exhausted, a terrible famine set in. Eighteen hundred people died of starvation, and the putrefying smell of their bodies, which were disposed of hastily in shallow trenches, only just outside the town, caused beasts to assemble from the surrounding country, so that the risk of being devoured by them was added to that of death at the hands of the Indians, for any who might venture beyond the palisades. Still, as the allowance of flour on which the survivors were living had shrunk to six ounces a day, whilst the flour itself had become almost putrid, there were many who were content to run both these risks for the chance of finding anything, either living or dead, which hunger might enable them to eat, in the woods surrounding the town. Amongst these was a young and beautiful woman named Maldonada, who, losing her way, and wandering amongst the woods, was at last taken by the Indians, and received by them into their tribe. A few months afterwards, however, the governor of the town, a man named Ruiz, succeeded in ransoming her, and she was brought back.
A Gallant Wild Animal.
For two whole nights an enormous puma defended the girl from the attacks of countless wild beasts.
Little good, however, was intended to Maldonada by this act. Upon her arrival Ruiz accused her of having wished to betray the town to the Indians, and, in expiation of this imaginary crime, ordered her to be taken again to the forest, tied to a tree, and left either to starve, or be devoured by any ravenous beast that might see her. The cruel command was punctually obeyed, and Maldonada, bound and helpless, was left to her terrible fate. At the end of two days, the Governor, wishing to have his ears gratified with an assurance of her death, sent a body of soldiers to seek for her remains. They found Maldonada herself, alive and uninjured, and the story she told was the same as that of the Gaucho left helpless, all night, on the pampas. An enormous puma, she said, had appeared soon after sunset, on the day that she had been left to die, and during the whole of that night and the following one, had guarded her against the assaults of numberless savage beasts that had raged around. God, she thought, had sent the puma to protect her, knowing her innocence; and this was the view that the soldiers, sent to find her, took too, as did also the townspeople, and, at last, the Governor, Ruiz, himself. Maldonada, on being taken back, was proclaimed innocent, and the war with the Indians being shortly brought to a close, she lived the rest of her life in happiness and prosperity. Whether she thought kindly of pumas ever afterwards, and always wore a mantle made of their skins in recognition of the service one had done her, I do not know; but were this recorded of her, I should see no reason to doubt the truth of the statement. The old chronicler who tells the story says that he knew Maldonada; but, instead of telling us anything more about her, he contents himself with making an obvious, poor pun upon her name. From this we may, perhaps, infer that, except when helped by a puma, she was not a very interesting person.
CHAPTER VIII
BEES AND ANTS—A ROBBER MOTH—ANTS THAT KEEP COWS AND SLAVES—ANTS THAT ARE HONEY-POTS—ANTS THAT SOW AND REAP.
The most wonderful of all insects—that, at least, would be the general opinion—are bees and ants. As bees are so very well known, and kept by so many people, I will not say much about them here, which will leave more space for the ants. Of the two, bees perhaps are the finer architects, for nothing quite so wonderful as their rows of hexagonal cells is to be found in an ant’s-nest. “He must be a dull man,” says Darwin, “who can examine the exquisite structure of a comb, so beautifully adapted to its end, without enthusiastic admiration”; and he goes on to observe that “bees have practically solved a recondite problem, and have made their cells of the proper shape to hold the greatest possible amount of honey, with the least possible consumption of precious wax in their construction.” No doubt these wonderful cells are now made instinctively, yet the bees can adapt their architecture to special circumstances, which shows the possession of reasoning power. Thus, should a piece of the comb fall down, they will not only fix it, by wax, in its new position, but, what is much more extraordinary, will strengthen the attachments of the other combs, lest they should fall too—for there can be no other reason for such an act. Bees, again, are sometimes much annoyed by the death’s-head moth which enters the hive at night, and devours the honey, apparently without danger to itself, though why this should be the case we do not know. After having suffered for some time, however, the bees barricade the entrance by building behind it a wall of wax and propolis, through which they make a hole large enough to admit themselves, but which quite excludes the bulky body of the moth. Here, too, we have reason and foresight in a high degree, as much, I think—perhaps more so—as has ever been observed in any occasional act of an ant, devised to meet special circumstances. For it is only in years in which the death’s-head moth is specially abundant that the bees act in this way; and, moreover, when it seems no longer required, they remove the barrier they have made.
The puzzling thing is that acts like this seem to show higher intelligence than, to judge by various experiments, one would think either ants or bees possessed. The results, for instance, of the experiments made by Lord Avebury in this direction, are rather disappointing than otherwise, especially with ants, creatures so far advanced in civilisation, as we may call it, and the ways of man, that they keep both cows and slaves, milking the one and making the others work for them. The cows are represented by little insects called aphides, one species of which we are accustomed to see upon our rose trees, and the milk is a drop of nectar which they exude from the abdomen, upon the ants gently tapping them there with their antennæ. Various kinds of ants milk various kinds of aphides, and some keep them in their nests, where, indeed, they are born, their eggs being tended with the same care as those of the ants themselves. Thus we see amongst ants a creature kept and used regularly for a certain purpose, as domestic animals are amongst ourselves, and this, as far as we know, is unique in the animal world. The aphides, too, belong to a family of insects quite distinct from the Hymenoptera, amongst which the ants are included.