I selected a very fine, serene, and luminous day—not luminous with the glare of summer, but the calm radiance of autumn (1st September 1856). I was alone, in a state of perfect silence and repose, and in that complete forgetfulness of the world which is so rarely obtained. After the manifold agitations of the past and present, my heart for a moment was at peace.
Never was I more ready to hear the mute voices which do not address themselves to the ear, to penetrate in a calm and benevolent spirit the mystery of the little world which on every side surrounds us, and yet has hitherto remained out of our reach and apart from our communications.
Alone with my ant, armed with a tolerably good lens, with a magnifying power of twelve, I placed it delicately on a large sheet of fine white paper which covered nearly the whole table.
With the microscope I could have seen but a part and not the whole. A very considerable enlargement would also have exaggerated the merely secondary details—such as the scanty hairs with which the ant is provided. Finally, its mobility would not have suffered me to keep it in the focus of the microscope; but the lens, as easily shifted as itself, followed it in all its motions.
Not, however, without some difficulty. It was lively, alert, disquieted, and impatient to quit the table. I was looking at it in the middle of the sheet, when it was already nearly at the edge. I was obliged to etherize it a little, so as to stupefy it, and render it less uneasy.
It appeared very clean, and highly varnished. Though a neuter, and not a female, its belly was rather large, and was joined to the chest by two small swellings. From the chest the head, which was strong and nearly round, detached itself cleanly and distinctly.
This head, seen as it were en masse, resembled a bird's. But instead of a beak it had a circular prolongation, in which, on attentive examination, I detected the reunion of two tiny crescents joined at the point. These were its teeth, or mandibles, which do not operate like ours, from above to below, but horizontally and sideways. The insect employs its mandibles for the most widely different purposes; they are not only its weapons and instruments of mastication, but the tools it uses for every art, supplying the place of hands in masonry, plastering, carving, and in lifting and transplanting burdens which are frequently of enormous weight.
It was well for it that its body was wrapped in a complete coat of mail. The ether affected it but slightly, and only stupefied it. After a moment's immobility it partly recovered, and made a few movements like those of an intoxicated person, or as if it were affected with a fit of vertigo. It seemed to say, "Where am I?" and endeavoured to make out the ground where it was walking, the great sheet of white paper. It attempted a few tottering steps, tumbling first on one side and then on the other. It carried before it a couple of instruments which at first I took to be feet, but which I found, on more careful inspection, were wholly different.
They sprang from a point near either eye, and, like the eyes, were evidently instruments of observation. These antennæ, as they are called, long, delicate, yet robust, and vibrating at the slightest touch, are fleshy, articulated in twenty pieces, and disposed one in another. They form an instrument admirably adapted for feeling and groping. But it is useful in many other ways: by means of it the ants transmit in a second very complicated advices, as, for instance, when they change their course and retire, or suddenly take a wholly different road; evidently they have a language like that of the telegraph. This supposed marvellous organ of touch is more probably a species of hearing apparatus, and so mobile that it quivers at the slightest vibrations of the air, and feels every wave of sound.