Consider the ants who are now swarming over the garden paths and pestering householders in such numbers.
They are denizens of another world. Members of a different and rival civilization.
Crushed beneath our feet, they are univ sally accepted as man's most dangerous rival on this globe.
Man is 100000 years old. The ants are 50,000,000 years old.
They are so enduring, so adaptable, so industrious, and so ce-operative that scientists consider that they might well have dominated the world and made man's development impossible.
If the ant, with all his organization, had been just a little bigger the world today would have been a world of ants. ere Whenever the ant tried to grow bigger his defective breathing apparatus failed him.
If the ant had only had lungs instead of mere breathing tubes—I should not be writing this article, And yet even so the civilizations of ants have reached a marvellous level.
Just as man in his history has been success sively hunter, cattle raiser and agriculturist, 5" there are all these types of livelihood fu the parallel under-foot civilization of the ants.
The ant is the only creature except man to keep slaves.
The ant is the only creature except man to keep cattle.
The ant is the only creature except man t> practise agriculture.
The most primitive ants are like bushman They simply go out and forage on insects. 1 The next stage of ant civilization and the best known are the cattle-raising ants.
Their domestic animal is the green-fly.
The green-fy sucks the sap of the leaves, He turns it into a sweet and sugary honeydew.
Millions of years ago the pastoral ants found the milk of the green-fly good and enslaved him.
They follow him on to his pastures—the leaf. They tap on his body with their club-like antennae.
The green-fly, who has been gathering up sap with his needlelike mouth, exudes the "milk," and the farmer-ant catches it in his Jed 50000000 years the ants have not succeeded jaws.
in devising a milk pail. Their inventiveness has gone in a weird direction, a direction grotesque according to man's ideas.
Some mysterious central intelligence has appointed part of the ant race to act as central-reserve stomachs.
It is the ants chosen for this role who do the milking.
They drink the honeydew until their stomachs are distended like barrels.
At the end of the milking they are unable to walk, and other ants help them home.
In the nest the overgorged "stomachs" are laid away in store places. When the other ants wish to feed they tickle the "stomachs" and force them to regurgitate the honeydew.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.