PHILOSOPHIC ANTS:
A BIOLOGIC FANTASY[41]
“Incomprehensibility; that’s what I say.”—Lewis Carroll (amended).
According to a recent study by Mr. Shapley (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., Philadelphia, vol. vi, p. 204), the normal rate of progression of ants—or at least of the species of ant which he studied—is a function of temperature. For each rise of ten degrees centigrade, the ants go about double as fast. So complete is the dependence that the ants may be employed as a thermometer, measurement of their rate of locomotion giving the temperature to within one degree centigrade.
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The simple consequence—easy of apprehension by us, but infinite puzzlement to ants—is that on a warm day an ant will get through a task four or five times as heavy as she will on a cold one. She does more, thinks more, lives more: more Bergsonian duration is hers.
There was a time, we learn in the myrmecine annals, when ants were simple unsophisticated folk, barely emerged from entomological barbarism. Some stayed at home to look after the young brood and tend the houses, others went afield to forage. It was not long before they discovered that the days differed in length. At one season of the year they found the days insufferably long; they must rest five or six times if they were, by continuing work while light lasted, to satisfy their fabulous instinct for toil. At the opposite season, they needed no rest at all, for they only carried through a fifth of the work. This irregularity vexed them: and what is more, time varied from day to day, and this hindered them in the accurate execution of any plans.
But as the foragers talked with the household servants, and with those of their own number who through illness or accident were forced to stay indoors, they discovered that the home-stayers noticed a much slighter difference in time between the seasons.
It is easy for us to see this as due to the simple fact that the temperature of the nest varies less, summer and winter, than does that of the outer air: but it was a hard nut for them, and there was much head-scratching. It was of course made extremely difficult by the fact that they were not sensitive to gradual changes in temperature as such, the change being as it were taken up in the altered rate of living. But as their processes of thought kept pace in alteration with their movements, they found it simplest and most natural to believe in the fixity and uniformity of their own life and its processes, and to refer all changes to the already obvious mutability of external nature.
The Wise Ants were summoned: they were ordered by the Queen to investigate the matter; and so, after consultation, decided to apply the test of experiment. Several of their numbers, at stated intervals throughout the year, stayed in and went out on alternate days, performing identical tasks on the two occasions. The task was the repeated recitation of the most efficacious of the myrmecine sacred formulæ.