a cup of three." In
some such mood of troubled thought, flung perhaps full length on the
turf, have we not as unconsciously and intently watched a little ant,
trudging across our prostrate form, intent upon its glorious polity: a
creature to which we, with our great spiritual world of thought and
emotion and will, have no existence except as a sudden and
inconvenient upheaval of parti-colored earth to be scaled, of unknown
geological formation, but wholly worthless as having no bearing upon
the one great end of their life--the care of larvae.

If we hold with Mr. Wallace that the chief difference between man and
the lower animals is that of kind and not of degree--that man is
possessed of an intelligent will that appoints its own ends, of a
conscience that imposes upon him a "categorical imperative," of
spiritual faculties that apprehend and worship the invisible--yet we
must admit that his lower animal nature, which forms, as it, were, the
platform of the spiritual, is built up of lower organisms.

If we hold with Professor Allman that thought, will, and conscience,
though only manifesting themselves through the medium of cerebral
protoplasm, are not its properties any more than the invisible earth
elements which lie beyond the violet are the property of the medium
which, by altering their refrangibility, makes them its own--then the
study of the exact nature and properties of the transmitting medium is
equally necessary. Indeed, the whole position can only be finally
established of defining experimentally the necessary limitation of the
medium, and proving the inefficiency of the lower data to account with
the higher.

It is these considerations of the wider issues that give such a
peculiar interest to the patient observations which have recently been
brought to bear upon the habits of the social insects, especially of
ants, which, living in communities, present so many of the conditions
of human life, and the development of the "tribal self" from these
conditions, to which Professor Clifford attributed the genesis of
moral sense.

In order to pass in review these interesting observations and bring
out their significance, I must go over ground which is doubtless
familiar to most of my readers.

The winged ants, which often excite surprise, are simply the virgin
queens and the males. They are entirely dependent upon the workers,
and are reared in the same nest. September is the month usually
selected as the mar