Page:Ants, Wheeler (1910).djvu/38

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ANTS.

Although Lubbock has not been altogether fortunate in the selection of species to illustrate his views, I believe we may adopt his conclusion that among ants "there seem to be three principal types, offering a curious analogy to the three great phases—the hunting, pastoral and agricultural stages—in the history of human development." It is obvious that a further development towards the three remaining stages in human progress—the commercial, industrial and intellectual—is not even foreshadowed in the ants. Nor would this be possible, or indeed conceivable, without conceptual thought and an appreciation of values to which the ants have never attained.

Granting the resemblances above mentioned between ant and human societies, there are nevertheless three far-reaching differences between insect and human organization and development to be constantly borne in mind:

1. Ant societies are societies of females. The males really take no part in the colonial activies, and, in most species, are present in the nest only for the brief period requisite to insure the impregnation of the young queens. The males take no part in building, provisioning or guarding the nest or in feeding the workers or the brood. They are in every sense the sexus sequior. Hence the ants resemble certain mythical human societies like the Amazons, but unlike these, all their activities center in the multiplication and care of the coming generations.

2. In human society, apart from the functions depending on sexual dimorphism, and barring individual differences and deficiencies which can be partially or wholly suppressed, equalized or augmented by an elaborate system of education, all individuals have the same natural endowment. Each normal individual retains its various physiological and psychological needs and powers intact, not necessail sacrificing any of them for the good of the community. In ants, however, the female individuals, of which the society properly consists, are not all alike but often very different, both in their structure (polymorphism) and in their activities (physiological division of labor). Each member is visibly predestined to certain social activities to the exclusion of others, not as in man through the education of some endowment common to all the members of the society, but through the exigencies of structure, fixed at the time of hatching, i. e., the moment the individual enters on its life as an active member of the community.

3. Owing to this preëstablished structure and the specialized functions which it implies, ants are able to live in a condition of anarchistic socialism, each individual instinctively fulfilling the demands of social life without "guide, overseer or ruler," as Solomon correctly observed,