Still on the whole, our senses are pretty reliable. The eleven different sorts of feeling spots in eye, tongue, and skin, that tell us about red, green, blue, heat, pressure, cold, pain, sweet, sour, bitter, or salt, and the ears and nose which we don’t know so much about, all these tell us, on the whole, the truth. Yet we never can be quite sure; so that wise people, and especially wise boys and girls, will beware of contradicting other people who chance to see, hear, taste, smell, feel or believe, a little differently from themselves.
XXIX
The Sight and Hearing Of Ants
So much then for our own senses, our sight, hearing, taste, pain, and the rest of the ten, or as many more as one thinks it worth while to count. The animals also have their senses, never apparently, more than ours, oftentimes fewer, sometimes very few indeed. So far as they have senses, these are like our own. But since some animals haven’t any eyes, yet can see—a little; and some haven’t any noses, yet can smell; and most of them haven’t any skins, yet can feel; one may easily guess that their seeing and smelling and feeling is not done quite in the same way that ours is.
I begin, then, with an animal that has eyes and can see, has no nose and can smell, and does its hearing with its legs. This animal is the ant. Of course, there are a great many different kinds of ants, as there are a great many different kinds of human beings, and these are by no means all alike. Some are black, some white, some yellow. Some are, for size, like the smallest letters on this page; some are more than an inch in length—and you can imagine their bite! Naturally also, sight and hearing, taste and smell, are not quite the same in them all.
Time would fail me to tell one half the strange ways of these interesting creatures, the most interesting creatures, probably, in all the world of little animals. Just as soon as you can, you must get hold of the books of Fabre, M’Cook, Sir John Lubbock, or Professor Wheeler, and read these strange things for yourselves—how the ants live in cities underground, have workmen and soldiers, carry on wars against their neighbors, raid their enemies’ nests and make slaves of the captives, have plant-lice for cows, and milk them of their sweet juice, and in return for this, feed and care for the plant-lice and their young, pasturing them on the roots of plants, and making no end of trouble for the farmers whose plants they are.
All this, I say, and many times more, no less fascinating, you can read for yourselves in the proper books, not only about ants, but about their cousins the wasps and bees as well. Just now, however, we are concerned with how much the ant knows, and how he manages to find it out.
Ants, in general, you must remember, live for the most part in total darkness under ground. The workers, to be sure, leave the nest in search of food, but the industries of the ant city, the storage of food, the care of eggs and young, and the building of the city itself, go on as if at the bottom of a mine. The queen ants, which lay all the eggs for the colony, and the male ants, who like the drone bees are gentlemen of leisure and don’t do much but loaf, are for most of their lives like the vine tendrils which I have already told you about. Whenever the light falls on them, they turn their heads down stream to the ray; and so if they move at all, they have to go toward the dark.
This, of course, holds them prisoners in the nest. But when at certain times of the year, a new brood of males and females appears, these ants, which, unlike the workers, have wings, suddenly become like the leaves and stems of plants; they have to head toward the light, and when they crawl or fly, they have to fly toward it. So when the rays of the sun happen to strike the nest, and light up the interior, out comes the swarm of winged males and females, leaving the wingless workers behind. Away they fly toward the sunlight; and those who are fortunate enough to find a suitable spot unhook their wings, settle down to found a new colony and a new nest. Thereupon, for the remainder of their lives, they turn their backs on the light like a tree root. The rest, however, die, after they have lost their wings, so that one sometimes finds great quantities of these scattered about after the swarming.
The workers, on the other hand, who have to be in and out of the nest about their business, do not have this tropism. They can take the light sidewise, or end on, or any other way, just as we can. The object of the tropism is to keep the males and females in the nest until swarming time, and then to get them out. Really, could there be invented a simpler or more effective way?