Page:Ants, Wheeler (1910).djvu/37

more remarkable, but also more obscure than the physical mutations now engrossing the attention of biologists.

Be this as it may, there is certainly a striking parallelism between the development of human and ant societies. Some anthropologists, like Topinard,^[1] distinguish in the development of human societies six different types or stages, designated as the hunting, pastoral, agricultural, commercial, industrial and intellectual. The ants show stages corresponding to the first three of these, as Lubbock has remarked (1894): "Whether there are differences in advancement within the limits of the same species or not, there are certainly considerable differences between the different species, and one may almost fancy that we can trace stages corresponding to the principal steps in the history of human development. I do not now refer to slave-making ants, which for slavery seems to tend in ants as in men to the degradation of those by whom it is adopted, and it is not impossible that the slave-making species will eventually find themselves unable to compete with those which are more self-dependent, and have reached a higher plane of civilization. But putting these slave-making ants o one side, we find in the different species of ants different conditions of life, curiously answering to the earlier stages of human progress. For instance, some species, such as Formica fusca, live principally on the produce of the chase; for though thy feed partially on the honey-dew of aphids, they have not domesticated these insects. These ants probably retain the habits once common to all ants. They resemble the lower races of men, who subsist mainly by hunting. Like them they frequent woods and wilds, live in comparatively small communities, as the instincts of collective action are but little developed among them. They hunt singly, and their battles are single combats, like those of Homeric heroes. Such species as Lasius flavus represent a distinctly higher type of social life; they show more skill in architecture, may literally be said to have domesticated certain species of aphids, and may be compared to the pastoral stage of human progress―to the races which live on the products of their flocks and herds. Their communities are more numerous; they act much more in concert; their battles are not mere single combats, but they know how to act in combination. I am disposed to hazard the conjecture that they will gradually exterminate the mere hunting species, just as savages disappear before more advanced races. Lastly, the agricultural nations may be compared with the harvesting ants."