The most interesting of the agricultural races of ants is that one commonly known in the West Indies as the parasol ant, from its fashion of carrying bits of flower petals over its shoulder at the angle commonly used with a sunshade. This ant erects an enormous structure, as large in proportion to its size as is the City of London to any one of its inhabitants. The dwellers in these cities are divided into classes: farmers, road-makers, explorers, nurses, soldiers, street sweepers, policemen, and, of course, the Queen. The great town is kept perfectly clean and sanitary by the scavengers, who remove all refuse every day. In case of death the bodies are removed some distance and buried. The soldiers guard the entrances to the city, and in case of attack by one of the Attila hordes of the barbarian hunter ants, they fight with a fury and courage so great that only after the entire army is destroyed is the city ever given up to pillage.
The explorers belonging to the nest scour the surrounding country in search of the material needed by the farmers, and following their indications, the road-makers clear paths a quarter of an inch in width and frequently a mile in length, through the immense tangles of the tropical forests,—roads as straight and useful as those of the Romans. Along these the farmers pass, often at the end of it to climb a tree fifty feet high in search of the bits of flower petals, with which they pass so continuously to the nest that the human observer will sometimes see what appears to be a thin trickle of pink or yellow through the jungle grass as far as the eye can reach. These flower petals are packed in the city's cellars, moistened, and sown with the spores of a minute fungus upon which the ants live.
Most curious of all is that these ants also keep pets—several varieties of tiny insects which they feed and protect, and which apparently serve no purpose save to give pleasure by their playful gambols. In every well established city of the parasol ants there resides a small green snake in a chamber built about him by the ants themselves, who feed and guard him, and when by any accident the little reptile is removed they abandon all their affairs until another is found to replace him. Unless this snake serves them as a fetish or deity there is no means of accounting for their desire for his presence, for as far as can be discovered he fills no purpose of utility. Mark Twain declares that the ants "vote, keep drilled armies, hold slaves and dispute about religion," and for all we know this little snake may be the centre of a complex system of theology.
Consider too Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," that remarkable study of a civilization so unlike our own. It is common to dismiss the bee's geometrical abilities with the futile word instinct, but honest students of the work of these astonishing insects have shown that, given a new situation to deal with, they first hold active counsel together concerning it, and then adapt their means to new conditions with all the skill and flexibility that suggest powers of trained reasoning. Here is a race that works for an ideal. The general good of the hive inspires in them as inflexible a severity, as ardent an abandonment of the desires of the individual as did the Roman patriotism of the elder Brutus, or of the young Scaevola. No more remarkable story is to be found in literature than Maeterlinck's description of the nuptial flight of the Queen Bee. Choosing a warm and perfect day in the very prime of the season's glow, distilling as she goes some intoxicating aroma—impalpable to our grosser senses—a perfume of love that drives every drone of the hives in passionate ardour to that deadly encounter, to which only he may obtain who can follow her arrowy course into the blue, where, out of sight of our feeble eyes, that one lethal embrace occurs after which the lover comes hurtling from the skies, dead and eviscerated. To provide this lover, whose potent tenderness shall ensure a myriad generation—this lover with greater wing flight than any of his fellows—with countless facetted eyes, with greater body and stronger limbs, this creature of such passion as to sacrifice his life for one moment of joy—the unflagging life work of not less than five of the sexless workers must be given, and hundreds of drones are raised each year that among them one may prove strong enough to attain to that dizzy aerial love.
Beside the stern, homogeneous, self-sacrificing civilization of the bees that of even the Japanese shows but clumsy, disordered and inadequate.
Many of the doings of these small brothers of ours seem incomprehensible and unreasonable to us, but imagine that three thousand foot giant looking down upon the mites in France and Germany in 1870 without an inkling as to the Spanish succession; upon the recent incredible scufflings and passagings back and forth over the veldts of South Africa without being instructed as to the term of residence required to obtain the franchise. To his ignorant eye how purposeless, how amazingly futile the whole affair would have seemed. And it is thus we move, stupid and contemptuous, amid great races and events, heavily indifferent to their meaning, to their significance to ourselves. We walk surrounded by powers whose forces we ignore, who work out their ends independent of us, yet against whom we are sometimes forced to battle mightily for existence. To the unreflecting man in the street the cinch bug seems a matter of small interest. No one interviews the coddling moth to inquire his intentions. War correspondents pass by the locust and ignore the cotton worm; the fly weevil and the ox bot seem to such an one but a feeble folk, yet every year in the United States alone these small races cost us more than three hundred and fifty millions of dollars, destroy one tenth of our agricultural wealth, and are more expensive to us than was the yearly cost of the Boer war to England.
We are the victims of pigmy captains of pernicious industries, beside whose gigantic operations such magnates as Carnegie or Mr. Morgan look—in the language of the streets—like thirty cents.
Darwin discovered that human and plant life would perish from the face of the earth were it not for the labours of that humble annelid, commonly known as the angle worm, through whose body the entire superficial soil of the globe passes periodically, and by whose digestive processes it is made amenable for agriculture. The termites subserve the angle worm's efforts by turning over and aerating the soil to an extent very nearly incredible to those who have given no attention to their industry. Our very existence is made possible by the myriad beings for whom our bodies serve as homes and battlefields, and whose dimensions are so minute as to be invisible save under the most powerful microscopes. Ferocious struggles take place within our own tissues between the germs of disease and the white corpuscles of the blood, those brave and sleepless warriors who patrol our veins, and who die by thousands with unreflecting courage in combats with malignant bacteria. When their ranks are thinned, their columns crushed, we succumb helplessly to our invisible foes.
How many of the great and good have fallen victims to those Brinvilliers of the swamps—the anopheles mosquitoes? And a greater number of the young flower of the armies of America and England were slaughtered by the enteric germs carried by flies than fell victims to Boer or Spanish bullets.
How little have we regarded the fly, and yet the facts about this little brother stagger the imagination! It is said to be certain that he came to this country in the Mayflower; but compare his conquests and fertility with that of the Pilgrims. Linnæus said that three flies and the generations that could spring from them could eat a dead horse more rapidly than could a lion, but later knowledge shows that, barring mortality, the number of flies resulting from one female in a summer would be something like seven hundred sextillions, and would in mere bulk outweigh every man, woman, and child on earth. Happily the fly has enemies.