legal history in a large way. The philosophical histories of the law have been the work of philosophers and metaphysicians, who have succeeded in rendering legal science unintelligible to lawyers and laymen alike. If we begin with man’s beginning, we at once get rid of the wildness of metaphysics and the dreaming of philosophy, for that shadowy learning is purely a human mental construction. The world was the same practically that it is to-day just prior to man’s coming. That coming added merely another kind of animal who knew neither philosophy nor metaphysics, but who had certain laws.
In the latter part of the Tertiary Age, just prior to man’s coming, certain animals had already brought social existence to such a perfection that from a time over a million years ago until the present those animals have not been changed in their habits of life. They had then become, and they still remain, most successfully adapted to conditions. To these animals the Wise Man in Proverbs tells us to go for wisdom: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.” This is, of course, a commendation of the feverish and unremitting industry of the ant, that is to say, of the female ant. The less said about the male ant’s industry, the better. But ants are more than a model for reclaiming the sluggard: Lessons of wisdom in the sphere of law, little dreamed of by the Wise Man, may also be obtained by going to these lowly insects.
It is not paradoxical even to speak of the jurisprudence of ants. They are, indeed, as the great Dramatist says:
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a polity of their own through which their communes exist and prosper under a set of laws which provide for the perpetuation of the society, the care and rearing of the young, and the provision of food by artificial means for the support of the community—a set of laws so successful in operation that ants are by far the most numerous of all the animal inhabitants of the globe and are spread almost as widely as men in climates the most diverse. While not domesticated as are their cousins, the bees, they have been a source of perennial interest. The vast amount of writing upon them, recording in many volumes the results of observation and experiment, enables one to speak with certainty regarding these small creatures. The humor of Mark Twain upon the stupidity of ants cannot be considered valuable in a serious discussion.
I need not comment upon the well-known facts that ants are insects allied to the other Hymenoptera like the bees and wasps; that but one of the community, the queen, produces any progeny; that the community is divided into defined castes of wingless and aborted females, who are the workers, and winged males, who are an idle and worthless class, except as to the one which fertilizes the queen, whereupon the useless herd of drones is killed, submitting to this fate with resignation. The ants select places for building the communal dwelling with great care and judgment in reference to drainage and the nature of the soil. Rooms are provided in the general pueblo, so to speak, for use as nurseries in the rearing of the young as well as for the storage and preservation of food. Two of the notable advances of the human race toward civilization were the domestication of animals and the cultivation of plants, yet the leaf-cutting ants, in rooms provided by them in the communal dwelling, fertilize their darkened fields and cultivate minute plants that furnish a store of food. Likewise the honey ants, who live mainly upon the sweet juices of trees and plants, have their droves of aphides, which live upon and secrete for their ant-owners the sweet saps of trees. These droves are herded and regularly milked by the worker ants. They are in every sense the domesticated animals of the ants.
Then, too, these astonishing ants have learned the lesson of communal sanitation. Personal cleanliness and cleanliness of the dwelling are rigidly enforced among them. They are indefatigible in removing all sorts of litter and refuse of food from their homes. They even harbor beetles, it is said, in their nests, who are kept for the purpose of removing the communal garbage. The homes are regularly closed and sealed each day, and as regularly opened, and sentries are posted for guarding the gates.
Human maintenance of roads is a comparatively late development of civilization. The ants, however, have their made roads stretching from their homes in all directions, which seem to be laid out with care and which they follow in their food or predatory excursions. When, in making a road, they come to a rill of water, they tunnel it in true engineering fashion and maintain the tunnel. The building of a cylindrical arch is a great invention of our race, but the ants were doing it before the lowest type of humanity appeared on this planet. The leaf-cutting ants are ingenious enough to sew leaves together to suit their purposes.
The ants have their predatory instinct against strangers, just as our human race had and still has it. A column of driver ants on the march, devouring every creature they meet, is probably the fiercest carnivorous horde on this globe. A settled tribe of ants has its scouts who, like the scouts who spied out the Promised Land, go forth to look over the land and, when they find a commune of another tribe such as they desire to attack, rush back to the main body of the tribe and make some report; then the army, in a scene of frantic excitement, imitated in our cities when troops go forth to war, begins to form. The whole tribe, except the drones, rushes forth from its dwelling and takes up its march; it arrives at the place of attack, and a sudden savage onslaught is made. The tribe that is attacked fights gallantly for its homes and firesides. The assaulting army of female workers, like the standing army of women of Dahomey or the Amazon bands of Penthesilea on “the windy plain of Troy,” fights as gallantly; at last all the warriors of the one tribe are killed, and the young and immature captives are carried away to be nurtured and brought up to increase the slave hordes of the conquerors. This is very like the Athenian conquest of the island of Melos, as related by Thucydides. It is very like the command to the Jews in Deuteronomy: “When the Lord thy God hath delivered it (a city) into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword. But the women, and the little ones and the cattle...shalt thou take unto thyself.” And such is the primitive law of war everywhere among men.
The maintenance of slaves is probably the most curious anticipation of the ants. The slave ants are obedient and hard-working; they seem to be satisfied with their condition and are devoted to their masters. Certain tribes of ants are perfectly helpless, and depend for their lives upon their slaves. The ants, of course, instinctively are seeking more workers, and the origin of slavery among men is precisely the same. Ants have no weapons, but some of them develop better natural means of attack, for among ants which have the soldier caste, who have larger heads and more powerful jaws, there is shown an improved type of “shock troops” who seem to be irresistible.
As a patriot devoted to her tribe and homeland, the ant is a wonderful creature. She knows no fear; she fights with devoted courage; she is eager for battle; she hurls herself upon the foe; she never retreats; either she dies on the field or she never leaves the field until the battle is won. The ant knows no good for herself as separated from the good of the community. If service be the test, she is entitled to the highest praise. She is an indefatigable worker and carries, for her, immense burdens. Her strength in proportion to her size is prodigious. If the burden is too heavy for one, two or more unite in the work. Her readiness to sacrifice herself for the public welfare is amazing.
With the altruistic civic service of the honey ants nothing in human life can compare. Certain of these workers act as reservoirs for food. They load themselves with sweet juices until their abdomens are for their size enormously distended; then they laboriously make their way to the home, and are helped by other ants up the wall of the room to the ceiling, and there they cling day in and day out until their store of honey is required by the society. Coöperation for the public good is the absolute law of ant life, and this law is scrupulously obeyed. But at the same time this intensity of communal life and feeling results among ants, as it often has resulted among men, in a bitter hostility toward all stranger ants. We have seen how remorseless they are in sacking the home of another community and in reducing its dwellers to slavery. Many an experiment has shown that stranger ants introduced into an ant community are at once set upon and killed.
It is a commonplace of observation of ants that the
