Du Bois-Reymond makes this striking remark:  “With awe and wonder must the student of Nature regard that microscopic molecule of nervous substance which is the seat of the laborious, constructive, orderly, loyal, dauntless soul of the ant.  It has developed itself to its present state through a countless series of generations.”  What an impressive inference we may draw 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 material to retain traces or relics of impressions brought to it by the organs of sense; hence, nervous ganglia, being composed of that material, may be considered as registering apparatus.  They also introduce the element of time into the action of the nervous mechanism.  An impression, which without them might have forthwith ended in reflex action, is delayed, and with this duration come all those important effects arising through the interaction of many impressions, old and new, upon each other.