When I learned for the first time, from the pages of Huber, the strange and prodigious fact that certain ants keep slaves, I was greatly astonished—as everybody has been by this singular revelation—but I was especially saddened and wounded.
What! I turn aside from the history of man in search of innocence. I hope at least to discover among the brute creation the even-handed justice of nature, the primitive rectitude of the plan of creation. I seek in this people, whom I had previously loved and esteemed for their laboriousness and temperateness, the severe and touching image of republican virtues—and I find among them this thing without a name!
What a joy, what a triumph for the partisans of slavery, for all the friends of evil! Hell and tyranny, laugh ye, and make merry! A black spot is revealed in the brightness of Nature.
I had flung aside Huber, and no book had ever seemed to me more hateful. Pardon, illustrious observer! your grandfather and your father had enraptured and charmed me. The first of the clan—Huber, the great historian of the bees—has inspired with new warmth the religion of man, and lifted up his heart. But Huber of the ants has broken mine.
It was, nevertheless, a duty to resume my perusal of his work, and examine it more attentively. An immoral, a Machiavellian, and a perverse insect is worthy of investigation.
But, in the first place, let us make a distinction. A portion of these pretended slaves may only be cattle.
It is enough to look at the ants, thin to an excess, brilliant, and varnished, to conclude that they are the driest and most parched of beings. Their singular acridity has been established by chemical researches, and science has contrived to extract the mordant formic acid from their bodies. Sometimes, when they are in peril, they hurl it at their enemies like a venom. Not a few species employ it in drying, blackening, and almost burning the trees where they establish their abodes. Is not a substance so corrosive for others equally dangerous to themselves? I should be tempted to think so, and to this extreme acridity should attribute their greediness for honey and other lubricating substances. I submit my hypothesis to the consideration of the scientific.
The ants of Mexico, in a specially favoured climate, have two classes of workmen,—one charged with the duty of seeking provisions; the other, inactive and sedentary, entrusted with the work of elaborating them, and making out of them a kind of honey for the common nourishment.
The ants of our temperate climates, for the most part incapable of making honey, satisfy their imperative need of it by licking the honey-dew found upon certain grubs, which, without labour, by the mere fact of their organization, extract saccharine juices from all species of plants. The transmission of this honey to the ants is effected quietly, and, as it were, by mutual agreement.