from the statement of Huber, who has written so
well on this subject: "If you will watch a single ant at work, you can
tell what he will next do!" He is considering the matter, and reasoning
as you are doing. Listen to one of the many anecdotes which Huber, at
once truthful and artless, relates: "On the visit of an overseer ant to
the works, when the laborers had begun the roof too soon, he examined it
and had it taken down, the wall raised to the proper height, and a new
ceiling constructed with the fragments of the old one." Surely these
insects are not automata, they show intention. They recognize their old
companions, who have been shut up from them for many months, and exhibit
sentiments of joy at their return. Their antennal language is capable
of manifold expression; it suits the interior of the nest, where all is
dark.

While solitary insects do not live to raise their young, social insects
have a longer term, they exhibit moral affections and educate
their offspring. Patterns of patience and industry, some of these
insignificant creatures will work sixteen or eighteen hours a day. Few
men are capable of sustained mental application more than four or five
hours.

Similarity of effects indicates similarity of causes; similarity of
actions demands similarity of organs. I would ask the reader of these
paragraphs, who is familiar with the habits of animals, and especially
with the social relations of that wonderful insect to which reference
has been made, to turn to the nineteenth chapter of my work on
the "Intellectual Development of Europe," in which he will find a
description of the social system of the Incas of Peru. Perhaps, then, in
view of the similarity of the social institutions and personal conduct
of the insect, and the social institutions and personal conduct of the
civilized Indian--the one an insignificant speck, the other a man--he
will not be disposed to disagree with me in the opinion that "from bees,
and wasps, and ants, and birds, from all that low animal life on which
he looks with supercilious contempt, man is destined one day to learn
what in truth he really is."

The views of Descartes, who regarded all insects as automata, can
scarcely be accepted without modification. Insects are automata only
so far as the action of their ventral cord, and that portion of their
cephalic ganglia which deals with contemporaneous impressions, is
concerned.

It is one of the functions of vesicular-nervous