Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, March 1885

For a young lady, travelling with a company would be simply impossible, unless accompanied by her mother, or by some trustworthy relative. A manageress might undertake the guardianship and execute the trust conscientiously. But this is an exceptional case.

There is another point, and a very important one, to be considered, and that is the artistic temperament. If a young lady of attractive personal appearance possesses histrionic talent, then in proportion to her talent will be her temperament. She will be impulsive, passionate, impressionable, self-willed, impatient of control, simple, confiding, and vain, but artistically vain, and desirous of applause. She will be illogical, inconsistent, full of contradictions, fond of variety, and unable to exist without excitement. It only requires her to be a genius to be duped by the first schemer that throws himself in her way.

So, when the theatrical profession is brought before you, my dear madam, as a calling for your daughter to follow, you see that on the one hand there is mediocrity and deterioration of character, and on the other success, at, probably, a ruinous price. This does not apply, and again I impress it on my readers, to those who are to the manner born. They will lead jog-trot lives, study their parts, make puddings, act mechanically every night, knit socks in the green-room, and be virtuous and happy to the end of their days. Their artistic temperament will not lead them very far astray, unless they have the feu sacré, and then, it is likely, they will make a hasty marriage, repent at leisure, and try to forget they ever bore a husband's name by making one for themselves. In some recent French romance an ex-actress is warning her daughter who has married a prince, against the fascinations of a young painter. The princess turns on her mother with, “Est ce ma faute à moi si j'ai dans les veines du sang d'artiste?” And the ex-comédienne feels the full force of her daughter's retort, which has in it a certain amount of truth. Public life has great dangers for young women of the artistic temperament: mothers cannot be always with them, and sheep-dogs are expensive and untrustworthy. Chance or ill-luck may bring your daughter, madam, to the stage, but you would not choose it for her, that is, the stage, being as it is, and as it is likely to be under the present conditions. When those conditions are altered for the better, it will be time enough for society to change its opinion on the subject.

But, it is urged, the present state of the stage is a vast improvement on the past; that the actor is a person of more consideration than formerly, and not necessarily tabooed from all society, but on the contrary, he is to be met in the very best drawing-rooms. It may be that a few, whom you may count on the fingers of both hands, have the entrée to the best society. It may be so; I am not in a position to deny it. But their genius, or talent, and their unblemished reputation have combined to place them on that pedestal exalted above their fellows. But was it not always so? Have there not always been a privileged few among the actors, as among other citizens of the Great Republic of Art and Letters, who have been admitted to the assemblies of the great, and whose hospitality the great have condescended to accept in return? Go back thirty years and at least a dozen names of prominent actors and actresses will occur to us as having been received in the best society. Now, in their time, the number of West-end theatres was about one-third of what it is at the present day. Therefore, if five actors were received by society then, there should be fifteen received now. If there are not, the stage of to-day is socially on the same level with the stage of thirty years ago, and has not advanced a step; if the number of presentable actors is, nowadays, less, then the stage has retrograded. I cannot make out that there are more received than formerly. There are a few University men on the stage, men of birth and education, entitled to be received in good society. But now we are speaking of only a section of society, and are begging the original question.

And why, from the nature of the case, cannot the stage ever rank with the recognised professions? Because, as a means of earning a livelihood, that is as a mere employment, the stage is open to all the world. Unlike painting, literature, and music, it requires no special knowledge of any sort; it can be practised as well by the unlearned as, though not with the same facility, by the learned. It is a self-educating profession. Physical gifts, up to a certain point, will make up for deficiency in talent: but given talent, and with perseverance and application even for the most illiterate, success is certain. Given genius, then “reading and writing” seem to “come by nature,” and though there may always be a little difficulty with the spelling, yet triumph is sure and swift. The stage requires no matriculation; but for an actor of talent, who loves his art, there is no limit to his studies, – one helps another, one leads to another. As far as society is concerned, there should be no one more thoroughly qualified to play a leading part in the very highest, the most intellectual, and most cultivated society, than the actor or actress, who is rising in or who has reached the summit of “the profession.” Scarcely a subject can be named that is not, in its degree, almost essential – a strong word, but on consideration used correctly – to the perfection of the actor's art. A first-rate actor should be an admirable Crichton. The best preparation for the stage is, as I have elsewhere insisted, a thorough education. True, that it is so for every calling, but especially for the stage. To belong to the bar of England is an honor in itself, even though the barrister never gets a brief and could do nothing with it if he did. To belong to the stage of England is not an honor in itself. To the genius, the talents, and the private worth of our eminent actors in the past and in the present, our stage owes its lustre. They owed nothing to the stage, the stage everything to them.

The desire to raise the social status of the actor so that the term actor shall be “synonymous with gentleman,” is worthy of all praise. To make it possible for young ladies of education to take to acting as a means of earning a livelihood, would be a great social benefit.

When a youth, well brought up, takes to the stage, he should not be immediately treated as a pariah. On the contrary, if ever there be a time in a young man's career when more than ever he stands in need of good home traditions, the companionship of his equals, and the encouragement of his superiors, it is when he has honestly chosen, as a means of earning his living, the stage as a profession. That, for evident reasons, it has been usually selected by the dissolute, the idle, and those to whom any restraint is distasteful, accounts to a great extent for the disrepute in which the stage has been held. Of course the statute-book and the puritanism of the seventeenth century have much to answer for in the popular estimate of the players. There is a strong leaven of Puritanism amongst us, and, in some respects, so much the better; but also among very excellent people of various religious opinions, there has been, and it exists now, a sort of vague idea that the stage has always been under the positive ban of the Church. In the temporary laws and regulations of different countries, enforced by narrow-minded men, civil or ecclesiastical, may be found the origin of this mistaken notion. The Church has never pronounced the stage the anathema. On the contrary, she has patronised the stage, and the first mimes who entered France from Italy rather resembled members of a religious order in their pious fervor, than actors of a later date in their laxity. If players were refused Christian burial, it was when they had neither lived nor died as even nominal Christians, and in such cases even “maimed rites” would savor of hypocrisy. In France the actors themselves were under this hallucination. M. Regnier tells us how in 1848 a deputation of comedians went to Monseigneur Affre to ask him to get the sentence of excommunication removed from the theatrical profession. “L'illustre prélat leur répondit qu'il n'y avait pas à la lever, parcequ'elle n'avait jamais été formulée, et que les comédiens français, comme les comédiens de tous les autres pays catholiques, pouvaient participer aux sacraments.”

It would be a comparatively easy task to trace the origin of this floating but perfectly false tradition, but I have already overrun the limit of this article. In the time of Louis XIII. the actors were excellent church-goers, had their children baptised, frequented the sacraments, and were on the best terms with curés of Paris; and it will be a consolation to those actors among us who, like the doll in the song, “pine for higher society” to be reminded, that the grand monarch himself did not disdain to stand god-father at the font to the first-born of Molière, and to do the like office to the third child of Domenico Biancolelli, the Italian harlequin.

Our leading actors and actresses of the present day will naturally strive, no less than those of the past, to do their best for the stage, and, in return, the patrons of the drama will do their best for them. But to claim for it, as its right, the social status of the recognised professions, and to be fussily indignant with society at large for refusing to acknowledge this groundless claim, is degrading to an art which should be as independent and as exalted as virtue, and content with virtue's reward. —Fortnightly Review.

GO TO THE ANT

In the market-place at Santa Fé, in Mexico, peasant women from the neighboring villages bring in for sale trayfuls of living ants, each about as big and round as a large white currant, and each entirely filled with honey or grape-sugar, much appreciated by the ingenuous Mexican youth as an excellent substitute for Everton toffee. The method of eating them would hardly command the approbation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It is simple and primitive, but decidedly not humane. Ingenuous youth holds the ant by its head and shoulders, sucks out the honey with which the back part is absurdly distended, and throws away the empty body as a thing with which it has now no further sympathy. Maturer age buys the ants by the quart, presses out the honey through a muslin strainer, and manufactures it into a very sweet intoxicating drink, something like shandygaff, as I am credibly informed by bold persons who have ventured to experiment upon it, taken internally.

The curious insect which thus serves as an animated sweetmeat for the Mexican children is the honey-ant of the Garden of the Gods; and it affords a beautiful example of Mandeville's charming paradox that personal vices are public benefits —vitia privata humana commoda. The honey-ant is a greedy individual who has nevertheless nobly devoted himself for the good of the community by converting himself into a living honey-jar, from which all the other ants in his own nest may help themselves freely from time to time, as occasion demands. The tribe to which he belongs lives underground, in a dome-roofed vault, and only one particular caste among the workers, known as rotunds from their expansive girth, is told off for this special duty of storing honey within their own bodies. Clinging to the top of their nest, with their round, transparent abdomens hanging down loosely, mere globules of skin enclosing the pale amber-colored honey, these Daniel Lamberts of the insect race look for all the world like clusters of the little American Delaware grapes, with an ant's legs and head stuck awkwardly on to the end instead of a stalk. They have, in fact, realised in everyday life the awful fate of Mr. Gilbert's discontented sugar-broker, who laid on flesh and “adipose deposit” until he became converted at last into a perfect rolling ball of globular humanity.

The manners of the honey-ant race are very simple. Most of the members of each community are active and roving in their dispositions, and show no tendency to undue distension of the nether extremities. They go out at night and collect nectar or honey-dew from the gall-insects on oak-trees; for the gall-insect, like love in the old Latin saw, is fruitful both in sweets and bitters, melle et felle. This nectar they then carry home, and give it to the rotunds or honey-bearers, who swallow it and store it in their round abdomen until they can hold no more, having stretched their skins literally to the very point of bursting. They pass their time, like the Fat Boy in “Pickwick,” chiefly in sleeping, but they cling upside down meanwhile to the roof of their residence. When the workers in turn require a meal, they go up to the nearest honey-bearer and stroke her gently with their antennæ. The honey-bearer thereupon throws up her head and regurgitates a large drop of the amber liquid. (“Regurgitates” is a good word, which I borrow from Dr. McCook, of Philadelphia, the great authority upon honey-ants; and it saves an immense deal of trouble in looking about for a respectable periphrasis). The workers feed upon the drops thus exuded, two or three at once often standing around the living honey-jar, and lapping nectar together from the lips of their devoted comrade. This may seem at first sight rather an unpleasant practice on the part of the ants; but, after all, how does it really differ from our own habit of eating honey which has been treated in very much the same unsophisticated manner by the domestic bee?

Worse things than these, however, Dr. McCook records to the discredit of the Colorado honey-ant. When he was opening some nests in the Garden of the Gods, he happened accidentally to knock down some of the rotunds, which straightway burst asunder in the middle, and scattered their store of honey on the floor of the nest. At once the other ants, tempted away from their instinctive task of carrying off the cocoons and young grubs, clustered around their unfortunate companion, like street boys around a broken molasses barrel, and instead of forming themselves forthwith into a volunteer ambulance company, proceeded immediately to lap up the honey from their dying brother. On the other hand, it must be said, to the credit of the race, that (unlike the members of Arctic expeditions) they never desecrate the remains of the dead. When a honey-bearer dies at his post, a victim to his zeal for the common good, the workers carefully remove his cold corpse from the roof where it still clings, clip off the head and shoulders from the distended abdomen, and convey their deceased brother piecemeal, in two detachments, to the formican cemetery, undisturbed. If they chose, they might only bury the front half of their late relation, while they retained his remaining moiety as an available honey-bag: but from this cannibal proceeding ant-etiquette recoils in decent horror; and the amber globes are “pulled up galleries, rolled along rooms, and bowled into the graveyard, along with the juiceless heads, legs, and other members.” Such fraternal conduct would be very creditable to the worker honey-ants, were it not for a horrid doubt insinuated by Dr. McCook that perhaps the insects don't know they could get at the honey by breaking up the body of their lamented relative. If so, their apparent disregard of utilitarian considerations may really be due not to their sentimentality but to their hopeless stupidity.

The reason why the ants have taken thus to storing honey in the living bodies of their own fellows is easy enough to understand. They want to lay up for the future, like prudent insects that they are; but they can't make wax, as the bees do, and they have not yet evolved the purely human art of pottery. Consequently – happy thought – why not tell off some of our number to act as jars on behalf of the others? Some of the community work by going out and gathering honey; they also serve who only stand and wait – who receive it from the workers, and keep it stored up in their own capacious india-rubber maws till further notice. So obvious is this plan for converting ants into animated honey-jars, that several different kinds of ants in different parts of the world, belonging to the most widely distinct families, have independently hit upon the very self-same device. Besides the Mexican species, there is a totally different Australian honey-ant, and another equally separate in Borneo and Singapore. This last kind does not store the honey in the hind part of the body, technically known as the abdomen, but in the middle division which naturalists call the thorax, where it forms a transparent bladder-like swelling, and makes the creature look as though it were suffering with an acute attack of dropsy. In any case, the life of a honey-bearer must be singularly uneventful, not to say dull and monotonous; but no doubt any small inconvenience in this respect must be more than compensated for by the glorious consciousness that one is sacrificing one's own personal comfort for the common good of universal anthood. Perhaps, however, the ants have not yet reached the Positivist stage, and may be totally ignorant of the enthusiasm of formicity.

Equally curious are the habits and manners of the harvesting ants, the species which Solomon seems to have had specially in view when he advised his hearers to go to the ant – a piece of advice which I have also adopted as the title of the present article, though I by no means intend thereby to insinuate that the readers of this magazine ought properly to be classed as sluggards. These industrious little creatures abound in India: they are so small that it takes eight or ten of them to carry a single grain of wheat or barley; and yet they will patiently drag along their big burden for five hundred or a thousand yards to the door of their formicary. To prevent the grain from germinating, they bite off the embryo root – a piece of animal intelligence outdone by another species of ant, which actually allows the process of budding to begin, so as to produce sugar, as in malting. After the last thunderstorms of the monsoon the little proprietors bring up all the grain from their granaries to dry in the tropical sunshine. The quantity of grain stored up by the harvesting ants is often so large that the hair-splitting Jewish casuists of the Mishna have seriously discussed the question whether it belongs to the landowner or may lawfully be appropriated by the gleaners. “They do not appear,” says Sir John Lubbock, “to have considered the rights of the ants.” Indeed our duty towards insects is a question which seems hitherto to have escaped the notice of all moral philosophers. Even Mr. Herbert Spencer, the prophet of individualism, has never taken exception to our gross disregard of the proprietary rights of bees in their honey, or of silkworms in their cocoons. There are signs, however, that the obtuse human conscience is awakening in this respect; for when Dr. Loew suggested to bee-keepers the desirability of testing the commercial value of honey-ants, as rivals to the bee, Dr. McCook replied that “the sentiment against the use of honey thus taken from living insects, which is worthy of all respect, would not be easily overcome.”

There are no harvesting ants in Northern Europe, though they extend as far as Syria, Italy, and the Riviera, in which latter station I have often observed them busily working. What most careless observers take for grain in the nests of English ants are of course really the cocoons of the pupæ. For many years, therefore, entomologists were under the impression that Solomon had fallen into this popular error, and that when he described the ant as “gathering her food in the harvest” and “preparing her meat in the summer,” he was speaking rather as a poet than as a strict naturalist. Later observations, however, have vindicated the general accuracy of the much-married king by showing that true harvesting ants do actually occur in Syria, and that they lay by stores for the winter in the very way stated by that early entomologist, whose knowledge of “creeping things” is specially enumerated in the long list of his universal accomplishments.

Dr. Lincecum of Texan fame has even improved upon Solomon by his discovery of those still more interesting and curious creatures, the agricultural ants of Texas. America is essentially a farming country, and the agricultural ants are born farmers. They make regular clearings around their nests, and on these clearings they allow nothing to grow except a particular kind of grain, known as ant-rice. Dr. Lincecum maintains that the tiny farmers actually sow and cultivate the ant-rice. Dr. McCook, on the other hand, is of opinion that the rice sows itself, and that the insects' part is limited to preventing any other plants or weeds from encroaching on the appropriated area. In any case, be they squatters or planters, it is certain that the rice, when ripe, is duly harvested, and that it is, to say the least, encouraged by the ants, to the exclusion of all other competitors. “After the maturing and harvesting of the seed,” says Dr. Lincecum, “the dry stubble is cut away and removed from the pavement, which is thus left fallow until the ensuing autumn, when the same species of grass, and in the same circle, appears again, and receives the same agricultural care as did the previous crop.” Sir John Lubbock, indeed, goes so far as to say that the three stages of human progress – the hunter, the herdsman, and the agriculturist – are all to be found among various species of existing ants.

The Saüba ants of tropical America carry their agricultural operations a step further. Dwelling in underground nests, they sally forth upon the trees, and cut out of the leaves large round pieces, about as big as a shilling. These pieces they drop upon the ground, where another detachment is in waiting to convey them to the galleries of the nest. There they store enormous quantities of these round pieces, which they allow to decay in the dark, so as to form a sort of miniature mushroom bed. On the mouldering vegetable heap they have thus piled up, they induce a fungus to grow, and with this fungus they feed their young grubs during their helpless infancy. Mr. Belt, the “Naturalist in Nicaragua,” found that native trees suffered far less from their depredations than imported ones. The ants hardly touched the local forests, but they stripped young plantations of orange, coffee, and mango trees stark naked. He ingeniously accounts for this curious fact by supposing that an internecine struggle has long been going on in the countries inhabited by the Saübas between the ants and the forest trees. Those trees that best resisted the ants, owing either to some unpleasant taste or to hardness of foliage have in the long run survived destruction; but those which were suited for the purpose of the ants have been reduced to nonentity, while the ants in turn were getting slowly adapted to attack other trees. In this way almost all the native trees have at last acquired some special means of protection against the ravages of the leaf-cutters; so that they immediately fall upon all imported and unprotected kinds as their natural prey. This ingenious and wholly satisfactory explanation must of course go far to console the Brazilian planters for the frequent loss of their orange and coffee crops.

Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the Darwinian theory (whose honors he waived with rare generosity in favor of the older and more distinguished naturalist), tells a curious story about the predatory habits of these same Saübas. On one occasion, when he was wandering about in search of specimens on the Rio Negro, he bought a peck of rice, which was tied up, Indian fashion, in the local bandanna of the happy plantation slave. At night he left his rice incautiously on the bench of the hut where he was sleeping; and next morning the Saübas had riddled the handkerchief like a sieve, and carried away a gallon of the grain for their own felonious purposes. The underground galleries which they dig can often be traced for hundreds of yards; and Mr. Hamlet Clark even asserts that in one case they have tunnelled under the bed of a river where it is a quarter of a mile wide. This beats Brunel on his own ground into the proverbial cocked hat, both for depth and distance.

Within doors, in the tropics, ants are apt to put themselves obtrusively forward in a manner little gratifying to any except the enthusiastically entomological mind. The winged females, after their marriage flight, have a disagreeable habit of flying in at the open doors and windows at lunch time, settling upon the table like the Harpies in the Æneid, and then quietly shuffling off their wings one at a time, by holding them down against the table-cloth with one leg, and running away vigorously with the five others. As soon as they have thus disembarassed themselves of their superfluous members, they proceed to run about over the lunch as if the house belonged to them, and to make a series of experiments upon the edible qualities of the different dishes. One doesn't so much mind their philosophical inquiries into the nature of the bread or even the meat; but when they come to drowning themselves by dozens, in the pursuit of knowledge, in the soup and the sherry, one feels bound to protest energetically against the spirit of martyrdom by which they are too profoundly animated. That is one of the slight drawbacks of the realms of perpetual summer: in the poets you see only one side of the picture – the palms, the orchids, the humming-birds, the great trailing lianas; in practical life you see the reverse side – the thermometer at 98°, the tepid drinking-water, the prickly heat, the perpetual languor, the endless shoals of aggressive insects. A lady of my acquaintance, indeed, made a valuable entomological collection in her own dining-room, by the simple process of consigning to pillboxes all the moths and flies and beetles that settled upon the mangoes and star-apples in the course of dessert.

Another objectionable habit of the tropical ants, viewed practically, is their total disregard of vested interests in the case of house-property. Like Mr. George and his communistic friends, they disbelieve entirely in the principle of private rights in real estate. They will eat their way through the beams of your house till there is only a slender core of solid wood left to support the entire burden. I have taken down a rafter in my own house in Jamaica, originally 18 inches thick each way, with a sound circular centre of no more than 6 inches in diameter, upon which all the weight necessarily fell. With the material extracted from the wooden beams they proceed to add insult to injury by building long covered galleries right across the ceiling of your drawing-room. As may be easily imagined, these galleries do not tend to improve the appearance of the ceiling; and it becomes necessary to form a Liberty and Property Defence League for the protection of one's personal interests against the insect enemy. I have no objection to ants building galleries on their own freehold, or even to their nationalising the land in their native forests; but I do object strongly to their unwarrantable intrusion upon the domain of private life. Expostulation and active warfare, however, are equally useless. The carpenter-ant has no moral sense, and is not amenable either to kindness or blows. On one occasion, when a body of these intrusive creatures had constructed an absurdly conspicuous brown gallery straight across the ceiling of my drawing-room, I determined to declare open war against them, and getting my black servant to bring in the steps and a mop, I proceeded to demolish the entire gallery just after breakfast. It was about twenty feet long, as well as I can remember, and perhaps an inch in diameter. At one o'clock I returned to lunch. My black servant pointed, with a broad grin on his intelligent features, to the wooden ceiling. I looked up: in those three hours the carpenter-ants had reconstructed the entire gallery, and were doubtless mocking me at their ease, with their uplifted antennæ, under that safe shelter. I retired at once from the unequal contest. It was clearly impossible to go on knocking down a fresh gallery every three hours of the day or night throughout a whole lifetime.

Ants, says Mr. Wallace, without one touch of satire, “force themselves upon the attention of everyone who visits the tropics.” They do, indeed, and that most pungently; if by no other method, at least by the simple and effectual one of stinging. The majority of ants in every nest are of course neuters, or workers, that is to say, strictly speaking, undeveloped females, incapable of laying eggs. But they still retain the ovipositor, which is converted into a sting, and supplied with a poisonous liquid to eject afterwards into the wound. So admirably adapted to its purpose is this beautiful provision of nature, that some tropical ants can sting with such violence as to make your leg swell and confine you for some days to your room; while cases have even been known in which the person attacked has fainted with pain, or had a serious attack of fever in consequence. It is not every kind of ant, however, that can sting; a great many can only bite with their little hard horny jaws, and then eject a drop of formic poison afterwards into the hole caused by the bite. The distinction is a delicate physiological one, not much appreciated by the victims of either mode of attack. The perfect females can also sting, but not, of course, the males, who are poor, wretched, useless creatures, only good as husbands for the community, and dying off as soon as they have performed their part in the world – another beautiful provision, which saves the workers the trouble of killing them off, as bees do with drones after the marriage flight of the queen bee.

The blind driver-ants of West Africa are among the very few species that render any service to man, and that, of course, only incidentally. Unlike most other members of their class, the driver-ants have no settled place of residence; they are vagabonds and wanderers upon the face of the earth, formican tramps, blind beggars, who lead a gipsy existence, and keep perpetually upon the move, smelling their way cautiously from one camping-place to another. They march by night, or on cloudy days, like wise tropical strategists, and never expose themselves to the heat of the day in broad sunshine, as though they were no better than the mere numbered British Tommy Atkins at Coomassie or in the Soudan. They move in vast armies across country, driving everything before them as they go; for they belong to the stinging division, and are very voracious in their personal habits. Not only do they eat up the insects in their line of march, but they fall even upon larger creatures and upon big snakes, which they attack first in the eyes, the most vulnerable portion. When they reach a negro village the inhabitants turn out en masse, and run away, exactly as if the visitors were English explorers or brave Marines, bent upon retaliating for the theft of a knife by nobly burning down King Tom's town or King Jumbo's capital. Then the negroes wait in the jungle till the little black army has passed on, after clearing out the huts by the way of everything eatable. When they return they find their calabashes and saucepans licked clean, but they also find every rat, mouse, lizard, cockroach, gecko, and beetle completely cleared out from the whole village. Most of them have cut and run at the first approach of the drivers; of the remainder, a few blanched and neatly-picked skeletons alone remain to tell the tale.

As I wish to be considered a veracious historian, I will not retail the further strange stories that still find their way into books of natural history about the manners and habits of these blind marauders. They cross rivers, the West African gossips declare, by a number of devoted individuals flinging themselves first into the water as a living bridge, like so many six-legged Marcus Curtiuses, while over their drowning bodies the heedless remainder march in safety to the other side. If the story is not true, it is at least well invented; for the ant-commonwealth everywhere carries to the extremest pitch the old Roman doctrine of the absolute subjection of the individual to the State. So exactly is this the case that in some species there are a few large, overgrown, lazy ants in each nest, which do no work themselves, but accompany the workers on their expeditions; and the sole use of these idle mouths seems to be to attract the attention of birds and other enemies, and so distract it from the useful workers, the mainstay of the entire community. It is almost as though an army, marching against a tribe of cannibals, were to place itself in the centre of a hollow square formed of all the fattest people in the country, whose fine condition and fitness for killing might immediately engross the attention of the hungry enemy. Ants, in fact, have, for the most part, already reached the goal set before us as a delightful one by most current schools of socialist philosophers, in which the individual is absolutely sacrificed in every way to the needs of the community.

The most absurdly human, however, among all the tricks and habits of ants are their well-known cattle-farming and slaveholding instincts. Everybody has heard, of course, how they keep the common rose-blight as milch cows, and suck from them the sweet honey-dew. But everybody, probably, does not yet know the large number of insects which they herd in one form or another as domesticated animals. Man has, at most, some twenty or thirty such, including cows, sheep, horses, donkeys, camels, llamas, alpacas, reindeer, dogs, cats, canaries, pigs, fowl, ducks, geese, turkeys, and silkworms. But ants have hundreds and hundreds, some of them kept obviously for purposes of food; others apparently as pets; and yet others again, as has been plausibly suggested, by reason of superstition or as objects of worship. There is a curious blind beetle which inhabits ants' nests, and is so absolutely dependent upon its hosts for support that it has even lost the power of feeding itself. It never quits the nest, but the ants bring it in food and supply it by putting the nourishment actually into its mouth. But the beetle, in return, seems to secrete a sweet liquid (or it may even be a stimulant like beer, or a narcotic like tobacco) in a tuft of hairs near the bottom of the hard wing-cases, and the ants often lick this tuft with every appearance of satisfaction and enjoyment. In this case, and in many others, there can be no doubt that the insects are kept for the sake of food or some other advantage yielded by them.

But there are other instances of insects which haunt ants' nests, which it is far harder to account for on any hypothesis save that of superstitious veneration. There is a little weevil that runs about by hundreds in the galleries of English ants, in and out among the free citizens, making itself quite at home in their streets and public places, but as little noticed by the ants themselves as dogs are in our own cities. Then, again, there is a white woodlouse, something like the common little armadillo, but blind from having lived so long underground, which walks up and down the lanes and alleys of antdom, without ever holding any communication of any sort with its hosts and neighbors. In neither case has Sir John Lubbock ever seen an ant take the slightest notice of the presence of these strange fellow-lodgers. “One might almost imagine,” he says, “that they had the cap of invisibility.” Yet it is quite clear that the ants deliberately sanction the residence of the weevils and woodlice in their nests, for any unauthorised intruder would immediately be set upon and massacred outright. Sir John Lubbock suggests that they may perhaps be tolerated as scavengers; or, again, it is possible that they may prey upon the eggs or larvæ of some of the parasites to whose attacks the ants are subject. In the first case, their use would be similar to that of the wild dogs in Constantinople or the common black John-crow vultures in tropical America: in the second case, they would be about equivalent to our own cats or to the hedgehog often put in farmhouse kitchens to keep down cockroaches.

The crowning glory of owning slaves, which many philosophic Americans (before the war) showed to be the highest and noblest function of the most advanced humanity, has been attained by more than one variety of anthood. Our great English horse-ant is a moderate slave-holder; but the big red ant of Southern Europe carries the domestic institution many steps further. It makes regular slave-raids upon the nests of the small brown ants, and carries off the young in their pupa condition. By-and-by the brown ants hatch out in the strange nest, and, never having known any other life except that of slavery, accommodate themselves to it readily enough. The red ant, however, is still only an occasional slaveowner; if necessary, he can get along by himself, without the aid of his little brown servants. Indeed, there are free states and slave states of red ants side by side with one another, as of old in Maryland and Pennsylvania: in the first, the red ants do their work themselves, like mere vulgar Ohio farmers; in the second, they get their work done for them by their industrious little brown servants, like the aristocratic first families of Virginia before the earthquake of emancipation.

But there are other degraded ants, whose life-history may be humbly presented to the consideration of the Anti-Slavery Society, as speaking more eloquently than any other known fact for the demoralising effect of slaveowning upon the slaveholders themselves. The Swiss rufescent ant is a species so long habituated to rely entirely upon the services of slaves that it is no longer able to manage its own affairs when deprived by man of its hereditary bondsmen. It has lost entirely the art of constructing a nest; it can no longer tend its own young, whom it leaves entirely to the care of negro nurses; and its bodily structure even has changed, for the jaws have lost their teeth, and have been converted into mere nippers, useful only as weapons of war. The rufescent ant, in fact, is a purely military caste, which has devoted itself entirely to the pursuit of arms, leaving every other form of activity to its slaves and dependents. Officers of the old school will be glad to learn that this military insect is dressed, if not in scarlet, at any rate in very decent red, and that it refuses to be bothered in any way with questions of transport or commissariat. If the community changes its nest, the masters are carried on the backs of their slaves to the new position, and the black ants have to undertake the entire duty of foraging and bringing in stores of supply for their gentlemanly proprietors. Only when war is to be made upon neighboring nests does the thin red line form itself into long file for active service. Nothing could be more perfectly aristocratic than the views of life entertained and acted upon by these distinguished slaveholders.

On the other hand, the picture has its reverse side, exhibiting clearly the weak points of the slaveholding system. The rufescent ant has lost even the very power of feeding itself. So completely dependent is each upon his little black valet for daily bread, that he cannot so much as help himself to the food that is set before him. Hüber put a few slaveholders into a box with some of their own larvæ and pupæ, and a supply of honey, in order to see what they would do with them. Appalled at the novelty of the situation, the slaveholders seemed to come to the conclusion that something must be done; so they began carrying the larvæ about aimlessly in their mouths, and rushing up and down in search of the servants. After a while, however, they gave it up and came to the conclusion that life under such circumstances was clearly intolerable. They never touched the honey, but resigned themselves to their fate like officers and gentlemen. In less than two days, half of them had died of hunger, rather than taste a dinner which was not supplied to them by a properly constituted footman. Admiring their heroism or pitying their incapacity, Hüber, at last, gave them just one slave between them all. The plucky little negro, nothing daunted by the gravity of the situation, set to work at once, dug a small nest, gathered together the larvæ, helped several pupæ out of the cocoon, and saved the lives of the surviving slaveowners. Other naturalists have tried similar experiments, and always with the same result. The slaveowners will starve in the midst of plenty rather than feed themselves without attendance. Either they cannot or will not put the food into their own mouths with their own mandibles.

There are yet other ants, such as the workerless Anergates, in which the degradation of slaveholding has gone yet further. These wretched creatures are the formican representatives of those Oriental despots who are no longer even warlike, but are sunk in sloth and luxury, and pass their lives in eating bang or smoking opium. Once upon a time, Sir John Lubbock thinks, the ancestors of Anergates were marauding slaveowners, who attacked and made serfs of other ants. But gradually they lost not only their arts but even their military prowess, and were reduced to making war by stealth instead of openly carrying off their slaves in fair battle. It seems probable that they now creep into a nest of the far more powerful slave ants, poison or assassinate the queen, and establish themselves by sheer usurpation in the queenless nest. “Gradually,” says Sir John Lubbock, “even their bodily force dwindled away under the enervating influence to which they had subjected themselves, until they sank to their present degraded condition – weak in body and mind, few in numbers, and apparently nearly extinct, the miserable representatives of far superior ancestors, maintaining a precarious existence as contemptible parasites of their former slaves.” One may observe in passing, that these wretched do-nothings cannot have been the ants which Solomon commended to the favorable consideration of the sluggard; though it is curious that the text was never pressed into the service of defence for the peculiar institution by the advocates of slavery in the South, who were always most anxious to prove the righteousness of their cause by most sure and certain warranty of Holy Scripture. —Cornhill Magazine.

LITERARY NOTICES

Episodes of My Second Life. By Antonio Gallenga (Luigi Mariotti). English and American Experiences. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

The autobiographer in this case (for the last year has been singularly rich in interesting autobiography) is not in any degree, at least for Americans, an eminent and well-known personage. But, in spite of this, his record of experience and vicissitude is full of interest, and we may almost say fascinating. His threescore years and ten have been crowded with events which, if not in themselves strikingly dramatic, are at least striking in the telling, for he has all the art of an accomplished raconteur, simple, direct and vigorous in style, and knowing perfectly when to glide over with little stress, when to put on his color with a vigorous and lavish brush. Mr. Gallenga (this being his true name) was in the latter part of his life a leading correspondent of the London Times, having achieved a high reputation in this direction prior to the days of Dr. Russell and Archibald Forbes. His work and position brought him into confidential relations with many of the most important men and events of Europe from 1840 to 1875, and he describes these in a racy fashion which will command attention, we think.

Mr. Gallenga as a youth of twenty took part in the Italian struggle for liberty in 1831, under the name of Luigi Mariotti. It was one of those brief episodes of revolution with which Italy was convulsed so often before the great final dead-lock came, which drove the hated Sedischi from her soil. The young patriot was for a short time in prison, but finally escaped, and lived for a while as a tutor in Tangiers. Thence he came to America, to carve a career for himself, and located himself in Boston in 1836. Here he speedily found employment as teacher, lecturer and writer, and was fortunate in securing the friendship and goodwill of the leading people of the city. Boston was then without dispute the only literary centre of the country, in spite of a few brilliant names in New York, and Sig. Gallenga seems to have found congenial employment and companionship from the outset. His reminiscences of such men as Edward Everett, Fields, Ticknor, Prescott and others are entertaining, and his sketch of the whole entourage of Boston society is given with a refreshing naïveté, as well as with graceful vivacity. Among the minor incidents which lend humor to the book is the author's experience with a young American beauty, with whom he was in love, and whom in his impulsive and passionate Italian way, he clasped in his arms and kissed. He professes himself highly astonished because the damsel was greatly enraged and ordered him from the house, ending the acquaintance then and there. After spending four years in America under unusually agreeable conditions, Mr. Gallenga, who was still known under his pseudonym of Mariotti, took ship for England, and bade a final farewell to the country of which he speaks in such cordial and even affectionate terms. Settling in London good luck still followed him. He secured introductions to prominent persons, was accorded recognition at once, and became acquainted with many of the people, both literary and otherwise, best worth knowing in England. A great interest in Italian affairs and literature was then the rage, and Mr. Gallenga, who was a scholar and an able writer, found ample opportunity and occupation in contributing to the magazines and reviews on subjects which he discussed con amore. A book which he published gave him repute beyond that of a mere fugitive writer, and he was fortunate in making literature lucrative as well as honorable. His gossip about prominent people and occurrences in London forty years ago, is very entertaining, and he shows as much skill in throwing light on the English life of that day as he had done in describing America. Twenty years of literary and professorial work, were frequently broken up by long residences in Italy, during which he sat for a time in the Italian Parliament, and helped to pave the way for that consolidation of Italian interests which at last led to Solferino and Magenta, and the grand result of Italian unity. He seems to have been accorded an important place in the councils and deliberations of his nation, and to have been an important agent in bringing about those relations which freed Italy from foreign domination. In 1859 our author became connected with the Times as correspondent, and since that time has been employed on many of the most delicate and important commissions. He represented them in the Franco-Italian-Austrian War, and succeeded Dr. Russell at the time of our late civil conflict; was sent repeatedly to every part of Europe, and, for a good while had a roving commission to write whatever he saw worth reporting and discussing, particularly on the peoples and events of the Mediterranean seaboard countries, from the straits of Gibraltar to the Dardanelles. Mr. Gallenga tells his story (and he has much to tell) with the vivacity of an Italian and with the ability of a trained man-of-letters. A number of books, mostly on historical and political subjects, have given him a recognized literary place aside from mere journalism, and he reviews a long, diversified and interesting career with an interest and satisfaction which he fully communicates to his readers. We have rarely read a volume more packed with interesting matter, narrated with the skill which comes of long training.

A Historical Reference Book, comprising a Chronological Table of Universal History, a Chronological Dictionary of Universal History, a Biographical Dictionary with Geographical Notes for the Use of Students, Teachers and Readers. By Louis Heilprin. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

The plan adopted in this handy reference book of historical dates and events has been to deal separately with the events of different countries, and an excellent system has been followed with great thoroughness. The author is very well known as an industrious and painstaking scholar, the results of whose work can be depended on. About many historical dates there is much confusion, and the difficulties in coming to a conclusion are great. Mr. Heilprin very modestly states the obstacles in the way of perfect accuracy, and convinces the reader that, if blunders have been made, they are such as are absolutely unavoidable in the dire chaos which envelops many of even the most important facts of history so far as certainty of year is concerned. We may be sure that every caution and pains have been taken by the author. In many cases where it is impossible to reach an absolute statement, two dates are given, the preferable one stated first. Such a book as this is of the greatest convenience, and one that a well-informed or studious man can hardly afford to be without. A remarkable seeming omission, however, is the non-assignment of date to the Christian era, or any reference to the life and career that gave it significance. The studious avoidal seems significant, but we may explain it on the theory that the absolute date of Christ's birth cannot be absolutely fixed within several years. On the whole, indeed, with this one exception (perhaps an unavoidable one) the compilation appears to be all such a work should.

Bermuda: An Idyll of the Summer Islands. By Julia C. R. Dorr. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

The germ of this book was in an article called “Bermudan Days” published in the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1883, and we find the paper incorporated with the work. The volume is a brightly written account of a vacation of three months in the Bermudas, one of the most charming sanitariums of our western seas. So much has been written about the pleasant lotos-lands of the North and South Antilles, that no new facts can be now told about them. But the old background of cloudless skies, summer seas, and balmy ocean breezes, which make such places as the Bahamas and the Bermudas earthly paradises, never get tedious or dull when seen and felt through the medium of a fresh and lively nature. In winter time especially, when the bleak cold of the north starts the imagination travelling toward summer climates, and those condemned to stay in cold weather, sigh for the delights of the more fortunate voyager, such books as the one before us make very pleasant reading. The author describes the attractions of Bermudan life: its roses and sunshine, its novel sights and sounds, the picturesque aspects of a primitive, contented, lazy population, delightful sails over beautiful seas, and all the episodes of the sojourn with the keenest enjoyment, and a skilful literary touch. The very essence of an agreeable book of this kind is an utter lack of anything like fine writing. Mrs. Dorr certainly shows good taste in this matter, though one might fancy the temptation would be great to try what is so often called word-painting. She tells us what she has to say, and she has many good things to tell us, too, in a lively, racy, picturesque, but utterly unpretentious way. Of course we do not expect anyone to write a book about the Bermudas, without giving us something of the oft-repeated tale of its history and traditions; but Mrs. Dorr has spared us from overmuch, and does not weary the attention. The enjoyable portion of the work is the personal impressions and experiences of herself and her party. As every traveller or tourist with a literary taste, finds it essential, nowadays, to serve the sight-seeing up in book form, we can only wish that more of them had the good taste and lively nature of the present author.

Elements of Zoology. (Appleton's Science Text-Books.) By C. F. Holder, Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, etc., and T. B. Holder, A.M., Curator Zoology, American Museum of Natural History. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

This new manual of one of the most interesting branches of science, is equally adapted for the school or for family reading. The object of the authors, which is to present in plain and concise language and in the light of the latest research and investigation, the life history of the various groups making up the animal kingdom has been well done. The best authorities have been followed. The authors, too, have introduced a great deal of matter of a descriptive and narrative matter, such as will thoroughly interest their young readers, such as the growth of the coral, nest-building fishes, luminous animals, animal electricians, hibernation, mimicry, etc., things which make certain phases of science almost like a fairy tale. The dry classification of science has but little attraction except to the professional scientist, and the authors have avoided this rock of dreariness as far as possible. The aim of the book seems to be largely to encourage the reader to become an original investigator, and to use his eyes and ears intelligently in observing the order of animated nature. The cuts are nicely and cleanly made, and the volume is very neat, though gotten up for service and not for ornament.

The Reality of Religion. By Henry J. Van Dyke, Jr., D.D. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

In this day of scepticism without, and dry-rot within, it well becomes the champions of the Christian faith to enter the lists with the keenest weapons furnished for the fight. Dr. Van Dyke argues, not from the standpoint of the dialectician, or from that of the defender of historical Christianity. It is the personal argument drawn from needs of human nature which he has here elaborated. He says: “We do not sneer at the dogmas of theology. They are certainly as important as the dogmas of science. We do not despise the questions of ritual. They are at least of equal consequence with the questions of social order. But religion is infinitely beyond all these. It is more vital and more profound. It does not appeal to the intellect alone. It is not satisfied with the conclusions of logic. Nor does it rest at ease upon the æsthetic sense. It reaches down into the very depths of the living, throbbing, human heart, and stirs a longing which nothing outward and formal can ever fill —the longing for personal fellowship with God.” It is this need of religion in the soul as essential to satisfy its truest and deepest longing which furnishes the keynote of the argument. He insists that religion is as absolute a reality, which we can feel and know in our spiritual life, as is the bread we eat to sustain our physical life. Dr. Van Dyke considers the subject under the heads of “A Real Religion Necessary;” “The Living God;” “The Living Soul” “The Living Word;” “The Living Sacrifice;” and “The Living Christ.” In the last, of course, we find the key-stone and cap, as well, of the logic of his thesis. The work will give comfort and satisfaction to many Christian souls, and is not unworthy of Dr. Van Dyke as an accomplished stylist. Chastened, yet glowing, subdued, yet strong, the book is one which should have a large number of readers among those devoted to the interests of the Church of Christ.

The Enchiridion of Wit: The Best Specimens of English Conversational Wit. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

This collection has aimed to avoid both the characteristics of the jest-book or of table-talk. Its place is between the two, being compiled from the annals of conversation, and comprising at the same time only those jests and stories which possess the stamp of wit as distinguished from humor or drollery. That the collection is good, one needs only to read the pleasant prefatory essay, which is very gracefully and brightly written, to feel sure that the taste and knowledge of the writer or editor have been well displayed in his work of selection. It goes without saying that many of the anecdotes are old and familiar. Many of the very best things ever said in the world, of course, are what we term “Joe Millers.” That they should be otherwise, would argue but bad taste on the part of our predecessors. But our present author has gleaned in many an outlying field as well as in the well travelled road, and gives us very satisfactory showing for his literary excursus in new directions. Some of the stories in the book we do not remember to have seen before in any similar work.

FOREIGN LITERARY NOTES

The monument to Virgil at Pietole (which is supposed to be the Andes of the Romans), near Mantua, was unveiled lately.

The death of a popular Russian novelist, B. M. Markievich, on the 30th of last month, is reported from St. Petersburg.

The original autographs of the love-letters addressed by John Keats to Miss Fanny Brawne in the years 1819-20 will be sold by Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge the first week in March, together with six unpublished autograph letters of Charles Lamb.

A pamphlet by Madame E. Coulombe is announced for immediate publication by Mr. Elliot Stock. This lady was associated with Madame Blavatsky for some years, and in this brochure tells what she heard and saw of Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists with whom she came in contact in India and elsewhere.