The student who makes the acquaintance of animals only in the trap or upon the vivisection table may well assert that the beast has
"No language but a cry,"
but those who approach their fellow beings with a mind divested of this self-righteous cant are well aware that the animals have means of communication as accurate as our own, and fully sufficient for all the needs of their existence.
To an ant the man standing beside him is as a creature three thousand feet high, would be to us. Now let us imagine this colossal person stooping to examine the tiny beings hurrying to and fro in a channel between a row of structures built of fragments that would appear to him no bigger than grains of sand. He would, of course, be unaware that this channel was called Broadway, or the Strand, or the Avenue de l'Opera.
"Do these tiny atoms think, reason, or speak?" he would ask himself. His ear, of course, would be unable to catch any vibrations of their infinitesimal tones, but he would notice here and there two of them pausing to touch their forepaws, remaining opposite one another for some moments moving their minute lips, and that thereupon one or the other would abandon his travel along this channel and move off in another direction, apparently led thereto by the communication of a command or suggestion from his companion. If this giant should chance to be an intelligent giant he would certainly infer that these men had a language.
Now let us step out upon the grass any day in June and in our turn use an intelligent eye. Here lies a dead grasshopper. A foraging ant comes wandering by. He surveys it carefully and estimates the horse power requisite to move it, and then hurries away in the direction of home. Meeting another ant he stops, touches antennae for a few moments, and passes on. The second ant makes straight for the grasshopper and finds it without trouble. Nothing can be plainer than that the first ant told the second one where to go. "A glorious windfall!" he probably said, "There's a dead Leviathan about two miles from here. Keep straight on till you come to a three-cornered rock, then turn to the left and you will come upon three grains of sand and a straw. Climb the straw, and you can't miss it. It's big enough to be seen a mile away." The second ant, when it finds the grasshopper, does not go home. It sits down and waits till the first one returns with a great gang of labourers, and then every one seizes hold of a leg or wing and the stupendous mass is slowly removed to the nest. Would any person with ordinary common-sense suppose these to be automata?
Had Huxley pondered the Scriptures and gone to the ant to consider her ways he would have certainly been cured of his haughty illusions, for not only has each species of ant a language in which he can communicate with other ants of the same species, but each nest or clan has, clearly, its own brogue; for an ant knows instantly whether another belongs to its own nest or not. The ants of one nest murder those of another. It is a point of honour with them.
We have seen that Huxley admits reluctantly that most animals have those portions of brain development that we believe to be the seat of consciousness, but here is an insect with organs and functions as heterogeneous from our own as can well be imagined, and yet there is no mode of life that men have tried which one or another of the races of ants is not pursuing to-day. Beside the agriculturists and herdsmen, some keep slaves to do everything for them, some live by hunting and plunder, while others quarter themselves upon us and live by confounding meum and tuum. Any ardent pomologist may study the herdsmen tribes by simply turning over the leaves of his young apple tree in the spring. Upon the broad succulent meadows of the under side of his foliage he will discover fat flocks of aphis cows, tended by brawny ant cow-herds, who keep a special eye upon the big brown bulls around which the cows and calves gather to feed. The herdsmen conduct them from leaf to leaf as they exhaust the sap, and at night by the long twig paths and barky roads they carry the milk of the sweet honey dew with which they are swollen. If the horticulturist be hard of heart and smear away a whole herd with a sweep of his thumb, the horrified herdsmen will rush frantically home, bursting into the nest to report to some hyksos king of the termites, that the Philistines have fallen upon his charge and that "I, only I, have escaped to tell the tale!"