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but not without the imitation and suggestion involved in an appreciation of the activities of its fellows.
An ant society, therefore, may be regarded as little more than an expanded family, the members of which coöperate for the purpose of still further expanding the family and detaching portions of itself to found other families of the same kind. There is thus a striking analogy, which has not escaped the philosophical biologist, between the ant colony and the cell colony which constitutes the body of a Metazoan animal; and many of the laws that control the cellular origin, development, growth, reproduction and decay of the individual Metazoon, are seen to hold good also of the ant society regarded as an individual of a higher order. As in the case of the individual animal, no further purpose of the colony can be detected than that of maintaining itself in the face of a constantly changing environment till it is able to reproduce other colonies of a like constitution. The queen mother of the ant colony displays the generalized potentialities of all the individuals, just as the Metazoan egg contains in potentia all the other cells of the body. And, continuing the analogy, we may say that since the different castes of the ant colony are morphologically specialized for the performance of different functions, they are truly comparable with the differentiated tissues of the Metazoan body.
Two further matters call for consideration in connection with the dominant rôle of ants, namely, their importance in the economy of nature and their value as objects of biological study. The consideration of their economic importance resolves itself into an appreciation of their beneficial, noxious or indifferent qualities as competitors with man in his struggles to control the forces of nature. As objects of biological study their importance evidently depends on the extent to which a study of their activities may assist us in analyzing and solving the ever-present problems of life and mind.
The activities of ants may interfere with those of man in three different directions―first, through their feeding habits; second, through their habit of appropriating certain portions of the earth as nesting sites, and third, through their aggressive, i. e., stinging and biting, habits. The first of these activities is far and away the most important. In respect to all of them, however, ants of different species have very different economic importance, some being highly beneficial, others as highly injurious to man, while a great number, owing to the small size and scarcity of their colonies, may be regarded, from an economic standpoint, as indifferent or negligible organisms. On this account, some myrmecologists regard ants in general as more noxious than beneficial, whereas others maintain the opposite view. I believe that