Life among the ants

There are many references to ants in the works of the ancients (Aesop, Plutarch, Horace, Ovid and Pliny), and these were quoted and elaborated by the mediaeval authors, but modern scientific investigation may be said to begin with the nineteenth century. Since then an enormous amount of work has been done by European scientists, but their papers are scattered through the files of obscure scientific journals in a great variety of continental languages, and are usually inaccessible or useless to the American student who wishes to make a serious (but not too serious) study of ant life and behavior.

The first general treatise in English was doubtless Sir John Lubbock’s famous work entitled Ants, Bees and Wasps, first published in 1881. This work was for many years a sort of standard textbook on the subject, and is still well worth looking into.

Another book which may be of use is Animal Intelligence, by George Romanes. The sixth edition, which appeared in 1895, devotes more than one hundred pages to the habits of ants.

Eric Wasmann has written a great number of books and papers about ants, one of the best of which has appeared in English as The Psychology of Ants and of Higher Animals, published in 1905. All of Wasmann’s works are valuable and well worth reading, but they are marred by his constant references to philosophical and theological matters which are of no great interest to the general reader. Father Wasmann feels called upon to demonstrate that ants, as regards their psychical powers, are much nearer to man than are the anthropoid apes, and is forever interrupting himself to defend his vitalistic biology and condemn the theory of organic evolution.

By all odds the best work available on the subject is the large volume called Ants, written by Professor William Morton Wheeler of Harvard University, and published in 1910. This book is, in fact, not merely the best but the only book required by the average student. There is, of course, a great deal of material which is uncomprehensible to one who has no particular technical background, but the whole thing is so admirably arranged that the student has only to glance through the table of contents to locate matter suited to his taste and training. I have made a very free use of Ants in the preparation of this booklet, some sections of which are little more than epitomes or abstracts of Wheeler’s chapters.