A little brown ant, the anergates, having no workers establishes itself as parasite in an ant-hill and gets itself served by workers of another species in order to live. What ingenuity of the sexed, what docility of the sexless! The worker ants are clearly degenerate females, among whom sexual sensibility has been completely transformed into maternal sensibility. One observes, moreover, in many species an intermediate type of woman-worker, who gives the key to this evolution. One should note that after fecundation the females do not all re-enter the city; where they fall, they build, as mother-bumble-bees, a provisory nest, acting then like workers, and await the first egg-laying, which will produce exclusively real workers and will thereby permit the normal construction of the new ant-hill.
There are among ants, as among butterflies, hermaphrodites along the medial line, or sometimes along an oblique line: this gives absurd creatures, half one thing, half the other, or singularities such as a female with a worker's had who functions as a worker.[2]
Polygamy by massacre of males, as among herbivora, and gallinaceæ seems a step toward a more logical and more economic distribution of the sexes. If antelopes perpetuate themselves very well with one male to an hundred females, is it not an indication that a part at least of the sacrificed males might have dispensed with being born? And would it not be better, in the interest of the antelopes, that a part of these males, if they ought to continue to be bora, should be normally sexless, as with termites, and entrusted with some social duty?
The organization of termites is very pretty; it will do to finish off this brief review of animal societies founded on the unsexing of sexes. One has already noted, in the chapters on dimorphism, the diversity of sexual forms, corresponding to four quite distinct castes. The minute examination of one of their republics permits one to assert differentiations much more numerous, for each of the principal castes passes through active larval and nymphal forms, adolescent forms, such as most neuroptera and libellules also present. In taking count of all the nuances one may observe in a state (to use the familiar word) of termites fifteen different forms, all with marked characteristics. The principal are: 1. Workers, 2. Soldiers, 3. Small males, 4. Small females, 5. Large males, 6. Large females, 7. Nymphs with little cases, 8. Nymphs with long cases, 9. Larvæ. When one attacks an ant hill, the soldiers arrive at the breach, very threatening, odd, with their bodies all head, all mandibles. The enemy routed, the workers come to repair the damage. There are sometimes several female egg-layers; sometimes there is only one male: copulation always takes place outside the hill, and as with ants, the males perish, while the fecundated females become the origin of a new state. The expeditions of travelling termites, common as fighting termites in South Africa, are naturally directed by soldiers. Sparmann (cited in Guérin's Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle) observed them during his voyage to the Cape, and says they behave rather as non-coms in close rank, or climbing onto grass blades, watch the defile, beating with their feet, if the order were bad, or too slow. The signal is at once understood, and obeyed by the rank at once, is answered by a whistle. There is in this something so marvellous that one hesitates to accept the traveller's interpretation in entirety. It is not the spontaneous and mechanical discipline of the ants, but the consenting obedience, so difficult to obtain from inferior humanities. After all, nothing is impossible, and without being credulous in these matters, one need be astonished at nothing. Nevroptera are, moreover, exceeding old on the earth; they date from before the coal-beds: their civilization is some thousands of centuries older than human civilizations.
Beavers are the only mammals, man excepted, whose industry indicates an intelligence near that of insects. But their societies offer no complication, they are a simple grouping of couples. They do not construct their dams until the females have been delivered, this happens toward the end of July, one sees no other connection between their sexual habits and their remarkable works.
These enormous trees felled and made to lie where intended, these piles stuck in the river-bed and interbound with twisted branches, these impermeable dams, all this hard and complicated work, the beaver accepts when pushed by necessity. He needs an artificial lake with unvarying depth; if he finds one made by nature, he accepts it, and limits himself to erecting his regular huts. Thus osmies, chalicodomes, or xylocopes,—or men, if they find by chance a nest prepared, hasten to profit by it. The instinct of construction is by no means blind; it is a faculty which will not be employed very often save in extremity: the present inhabitant of the Loire valley still arranges the caves for domestic use. To its injury, but of that it knows nothing, the bee profits by the artificial combs slid into its hive. The Rhone beaver has rested ever since men erected such excellent dams there. The fairy palace which rises in mid forest for the rubbing of a ring is the human, and animal, ideal.
I must dose these observations on natural societies, in pointing out that if they are today based on something quite different from polygamy, it seems likely that they were in origin societies either of polygamy or of sexual communism. If one starts from communism one will very soon evolve either toward the couple, or toward polygamy, if it is a matter of mammals; or toward sexual neutralization if it is a matter of insects. The couple, polygamy, neutralization are methods; sexual communism is not a method, and for that reason one must consider it as the chaos from which order has little by little emerged.
[1] Bienenzeitung (Gazette des Abeilles) janvier, 1850.
[2] E. Rambert, after A. Forel, les Mœurs des fourmis (Bibliothèque universelle, tome LV).