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.  Hueber put a few slaveholders into a box with some of their own larvae and pupae, 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 larvae 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, Hueber 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 larvae, helped several pupae 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