recognition of members of the same nest; powers of communication; keeping aphides for the sake of their sweet secretion; collection of aphid eggs in October, hatching them out in the nest, and taking them in the spring to the daisies, on which they feed, for pasture; slave-making and slavekeeping, which, in some cases, is so ancient a habit that the enslavers are unable even to feed themselves; keeping insects as beasts of burden, e.g. a kind of plant-bug to carry leaves; keeping beetles, etc., as domestic pets; habits of personal cleanliness, one ant giving another a brush-up, and being brushed-up in return; habits of play and recreation; habits of burying the dead; the storage of grain and nipping the budding rootlet to prevent further germination; the habits described by Dr. Lincecum, and to a large extent confirmed by Dr. McCook, that Texan ants prepare a clearing around their nest, and six months later harvest the ant-rice, a kind of grass of which they are particularly fond, even, according to Lincecum, seeking and sowing the grain which shall yield this harvest; the collection by other ants of grass to manure the soil on which there subsequently grows a species of fungus upon which they feed; the military organization of the ecitons of Central America; and so forth. Now, the description of the habits of ants forms one of the most interesting chapters in natural history. But to class them all as illustrations of instinct is a survival of an old-fashioned method of treatment.

To put the matter in another way. Suppose that an intelligent ant were to make observations on human behaviour as displayed in one of our great cities or in an agricultural district. Seeing so great an amount of routine work going on around him, might he not be in danger of regarding all this as evidence of hereditary instinct? Might he not find it. difficult to obtain satisfactory evidence of the establishment of our habits, of the fact that this routine work has to some extent to be learnt? Might he not say (perhaps not wholly without truth), "I can see nothing whatever in the training of the children of these men to fit them for their life-work. The training of their children has no more apparent bearing

upon the activities of their after-life than the feeding of our grubs has on the duties of ant-life. And although we must remember," he might continue, "that these large animals do not have the advantage which we possess of awaking suddenly, as by a new birth, to their full faculties, still, as they grow older, now one and now another of their deferred instincts is unfolded and manifested. They fall into the routine of life with little or no training as the period proper to the various instincts arrives. If learning thereof there be, it has at present escaped our observation. And such intelligence as their activities evince (and many of them do show remarkable adaptation to uniform conditions of life) would seem to be rather ancestral than of the present time; as is shown by the fact that many of the adaptations are directed rather to past conditions of life than to those which now hold good. In the presence of new emergencies to which their instincts have not fitted them, these poor men are often completely at a loss. We cannot but conclude, therefore, that, although shown under somewhat different and less favourable conditions, instinct occupies fully as large a space in the psychology of man as it does in that of the ant, while their intelligence is far less unerring and, therefore, markedly inferior to our own."

Of course, the views here attributed to the ant are very absurd. But are they much more absurd than the views of those who, on the evidence which we at present possess, attribute all the varied activities of ant-life to instinct? Take the case of the ecitons, or military ants, or the harvesting ants, or the ants that are said to keep draught-bugs as beasts of burden have we sufficient evidence to enable us to affirm that these modes of behaviour are purely instinctive and not intelligent; that all the varied manoeuvres of the military ants, for example, are displayed to the full without any learning or imitation, without teaching and without intelligence on the part of every individual in the army.

That in some cases there is something very like a training or education of the ant when it emerges from the pupa condition is rendered probable by the observations of M. Forel.

As Romanes says, "The young ant does not appear to come into the world with a full instinctive knowledge of all its duties as a member of a social community. It is led about the nest and trained to a knowledge of domestic duties, especially in the case of larvæ.' Later on, the young ants are taught to distinguish between friends and foes."

We have only to weigh the evidence brought forward by such observers as Fabre and Dr. Peckham to see that among the solitary wasps and mason bees the behaviour, though founded on instinct, is in large degree modified by intelligence. The care with which a site for the tunnelled nest in the ground is selected, betokens something more than instinct. The following is a slightly condensed statement of Dr. and Mrs. Peckham's observations on one of the solitary wasps (Aporus fasciatus). "We were working one day in the melon-field when we saw one of these little wasps going backwards and dragging a spider. She twice left it on the ground while she circled about for a moment, but soon carried it up on to one of the large melon leaves, and left it there while she made a long and careful study of the locality, skimming close to the ground in and out among the vines; at length she went under a leaf close to the ground, and began to dig. After her head was well down in the ground we broke off the leaf that we might see her method of work. She went on for ten minutes without noticing the change, and then, without any circling, flew off to visit her spider. When she tried to return to her hole it was evident that some landmark was missing. Again and again she zig-zagged from the spider to the nesting-place, going by a sort of path among the vines from leaf to leaf, and from blossom to blossom, but when she reached the spot she did not recognize it. At last we laid the leaf back in its place over the opening, when she at once went in and resumed her work, keeping at it steadily for ten minutes longer. At this point she suddenly reversed her operations, and began to fill in the hole that she had made. She then glanced at the spider,

"Animal Intelligence," p. 59.

"Instincts and Habits of the Solitary Wasps," p. 55.

selected a new place, and began to dig again. This hole was also filled in; she looked once more at the spider, and started a nest in a new place. This, in turn, was soon abandoned, as was a fourth. The fifth beginning was made under a leaf that lay close to the ground, but after twenty minutes' work this place also was abandoned and a sixth started. This, however, was the final choice, and after forty-five minutes spent in digging it was completed."

This description shows an amount of apparent fastidiousness which is quite irreconcilable with the hypothesis that the behaviour is merely instinctive. Not less fastidious are some wasps in the temporary closure of the hole with a stone or pellet of earth, the operation being repeated several times

FIG. 19.-Solitary Wasp using a stone to beat down the earth
over its nest (after Peckham).

with different covers before the insect seems to be satisfied; while in other cases the hole is hidden by bringing earth in such quantity as to render the place indistinguishable from the rest of the field. But in one case observed by Dr. Peckham, intelligent procedure was carried so far as apparently to involve the use of a tool, the same behaviour having been independently observed in the same genus (Ammophila) by Dr. S. W. Williston of Kansas University. "Just

here," writes Dr. Peckham," "must be told the story of one little wasp whose individuality stands out in our minds more distinctly than that of any of the others. In filling up her nest she put her head down into it and bit away the loose earth from the sides, letting it fall to the bottom of the burrow, and then, after a quantity had accumulated, jammed it down with her head. Earth was then brought from the outside and pressed in, and then more was bitten from the sides. When, at last, the filling was level with the ground, she brought a quantity of fine grains of dirt to the spot, and, picking up a small pebble in her mandibles, used it as a hammer in pounding them down with rapid strokes, thus making this spot as hard and firm as the surrounding surface. Before we could recover from our astonishment at this performance she had dropped her stone and was bringing more earth, and in a moment we saw her pick up the pebble and again pound the earth into place with it. Once more the whole process was repeated, and then the little creature flew away."

Here we have intelligent behaviour rising to a level to which some would apply the term rational. For the act may be held to afford evidence of the perception of the relation of the means employed to an end to be attained, and some general conception of purpose. In this section, which deals with description of behaviour based on observation, the psychological explanation cannot be discussed. Similar indications of deliberate action may be held to be afforded by the sometimes elaborate "locality studies" which these insects seem to make, by the "care that is taken by wasps to acquaint themselves with the surroundings of their nests." A Sphex, for example, which had partially made and then abandoned several nests, left them without any locality study; but when she had completed a nest in a suitable spot she made "a most thorough and systematic study of the surroundings. She flew in and out among the plants, first in narrow circles near the surface of the ground, and then in wider and wider ones as * Op. cit., p. 22,