The ants were all of the
same species, therefore the friends had to be recognized by form and
feature--friends who formed part of a hive of five hundred thousand! Has
any man a memory for form and feature approaching that?
Y.M. Certainly not.
O.M. Franklin's ants and Lubbuck's ants show fine capacities of putting
this and that together in new and untried emergencies and deducting smart
conclusions from the combinations--a man's mental process exactly. With
memory to help, man preserves his observations and reasonings, reflects
upon them, adds to them, recombines, and so proceeds, stage by stage, to
far results--from the teakettle to the ocean greyhound's complex engine;
from personal labor to slave labor; from wigwam to palace; from the
capricious chase to agriculture and stored food; from nomadic life to
stable government and concentrated authority; from incoherent hordes to
massed armies. The ant has observation, the reasoning faculty, and the
preserving adjunct of a prodigious memory; she has duplicated man's
development and the essential features of his civilization, and you call
it all instinct!
Y.M. Perhaps I lacked the reasoning faculty myself.
O.M. Well, don't tell anybody, and don't do it again.
Y.M. We have come a good way. As a result--as I understand it--I am
required to concede that there is absolutely no intellectual frontier
separating Man and the Unrevealed Creatures?
O.
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