SHORT ARTICLES. · Latin Puzzle, 535. Gold Ants of Herodotus, 549. Manifold Writers, 549. Burning Alive, 549. Pope and Hogarth, 559. She took the cup of life to sip, 563. Medieval Rhymes, 567. Alleged Interpolations in the "Te Deum," 567. Bee Superstitions, 576. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL, SON, & CO., BOSTON. For Six Dollars a year, in advance, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded free of postage. Complete sets of the First Scries, in thirty-six volumes, and of the Second Series, in twenty volumes, handsomely bound, packed in neat boxes, and delivered in all the principal cities, free of expense of freight, are for sale at two dollars a volume. ANY VOLUME may be had separately, at two dollars, bound, or a dollar and a half in numbers. ANY NUMBER may be had for 13 cents; and it is well worth while for subscribers or purchasers to complete any broken volumes they may have, and thus greatly enhance their value. O! SUCH a ruff the Marquis wears,- With Indian pearl-seed edged and bound; This is the Marquis. Then the Fop, His buttons every one a gem; A jewel hangs from either car, But see my Willy-kissing glove— Stabbing his shadow-brave and free swea He dances through the palace lands, Greeting each bird that sings like me. His velvet cap is looped with chains; Red rubies in his bonnet flame So gay, so bright, and debonnaireI love to hear his very name. -Welcome Guest. WALTER THORNBURY. ANY contribution to our natural history literature from the pen of Mr. C. Darwin, is certain to command attention. His scientific attainments, his insight and carefulness as an observer, blended with no scanty measure of imaginative sagacity, and his clear and lively style, make all his writings unusually attractive. His present volume on the "Origin of Species" is the result of many years of observation, thought, and speculation; and is manifestly regarded by him as the " opus" upon which his future fame is to rest. It is true that he announces it modestly enough as the mere precursor of a mightier volume. But that volume is only intended to supply the facts which are to support the completed argument of the present essay. In this we have a specimencollection of the vast accumulation; and, working from these as the high analytical mathematician may work from the admitted results of his conic sections, he proceeds to deduce all the conclusions to which he wishes to conduct his readers. essay of unsuspected relations which bind together all the mighty web which stretches from end to end of this full and most diversified earth. Who, as he listened to the musical hum of the great humble-bees, or marked their ponderous flight from flower to flower, and watched the unpacking of their trunks for their work of suction, would have supposed that the multiplication or diminution of their race, or the fruitfulness and sterility of the red clover, depend as directly on the vigilance of our cats as do those of our wellguarded game-preserves on the watching of our keepers? Yet this Mr. Darwin has discovered to be literally the case : "From experiments which I have lately tried, I have found that the visits of bees are necessary for the fertilization of some kinds of clover; but humble-bees alone visit the red clover (Trifolium pratense), as other bees cannot reach the nectar. Hence I have very little doubt, that if the whole genus of humble-bees became extinct or very rare in England, the heartsease and red clover would become very rare or wholly disaptrict depends in a great degree on the number pear. The number of humble-bees in any disof field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests; and Mr. H. Newman, who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, believes that 'more than two-thirds of them are thus destroyed all over England.' Now the number of mice is largely dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats; and Mr. Newman says, 'near villages and small towns I have found is full of Mr. Darwin's characthe nests of humble-bees more numerous than teristic excellences. It is a most readable elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of book; full of facts in natural history, old cats that destroy the mice.' Hence, it is quite and new, of his collecting and of his observ-credible that the presence of a feline animal in ing; and all of these are told in his own perspicuous language, and all thrown into picturesque combinations, and all sparkle with the colors of fancy and the lights of imagin- Again, how beautiful are the experiments ation. It assumes, too, the grave propor-recorded by him concerning that wonderful tions of a sustained argument upon a matrelation of the ants to the aphides, which ter of the deepest interest, not to naturalists would almost warrant us in giving to the only, or even to men of science exclusively, but to every one who is interested in the his-aphis the name of Vacca formicaria:tory of man and of the relations of nature around him to the history and plan of crea The tion. through the intervention, first of mice, and then large numbers in a district might determine, of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district."-P. 74. "One of the strongest instances of an animal apparently performing an action for the sole good of another with which I am acquainted is that of aphides voluntarily yielding their sweet With Mr. Darwin's "argument" we may excretion to ants. That they do so voluntarily say in the outset that we shall have much the following facts will show. I removed all and grave fault to find. But this does not the ants from a group of about a dozen aphides make us the less disposed to admire the sin- during several hours. After this interval, I felt on a dock plant, and prevented their attendance gular excellences of his work; and we will sure that the aphides would want to excrete. I seek in limine to give our readers a few ex-watched them for some time through a lens, but amples of these. Here, for instance, is a stroked them with a hair in the same manner, as beautiful illustration of the wonderful inter-well as I could, as the ants do with their andependence of nature of the golden chain tennæ, but not one excreted. Afterwards I not one of them excreted. I then tickled and allowed an ant to visit them, and it immediately the observations which I have myself made in seemed by its eager way of running about, to some little detail. I opened fourteen nests of be well aware what a rich flock it had discovered. F. sanguinea, and found a few slaves in each. It then began to play with its antennæ on the Males and fertile females of the slave-species abdomen first of one aphis and then of another, (F. fusca) are found only in their own proper and each aphis, as soon as it felt the antennæ, communities, and have never been observed in immediately lifted up its abdomen and ex- the nests of F. sanguinea. The slaves are black, creted a limpid drop of sweet juice, which was and not above half the size of their red masters, cagerly devoured by the ant. Even the quite so that the contrast in their appearance is very young aphides behaved in this manner, showing great. When the nest is slightly disturbed, the that the action was instinctive, and not the re-slaves occasionally come out, and, like their sult of experience."-Pp. 210, 211. Or take the following admirable specimen of the union of which we have spoken, of the employment of the observations of others with what he has observed himself, in that which is almost the most marvellous of facts -the slave-making instinct of certain ants. We say nothing at present of the place assigned to these facts in Mr. Darwin's argument, but are merely referring to the collection, observation, and statement of the facts themselves: Slave-making Instinct. This remarkable instinct was first discovered in the Formica (Polyerges) rufescens by Pierre Huber, a better observer even than his celebrated father. This ant is absolutely dependent on its slaves; without their aid the species would certainly become extinct in a single year. The males and fertile females do not work. The workers or sterile females, though most energetic and courageous in capturing slaves, do no other work. They are incapable of making their own nests or of feeding their own larvae. When the old nest is found inconvenient, and they have to migrate, it is the slaves which determine the migration, and actually carry their masters in their jaws. So utterly helpless are the masters, that when Huber shut up thirty of them without a slave, but with plenty of the food which they like best, and with their larvæ and pup to stimulate them to work, they did nothing; they could not even feed themselves, and many perished of hunger. Huber then introduced a single slave (F. fusca), and she instantly set to work, fed and saved the survivors, made some cells and tended the larva, and put all to rights. What can be more extraordinary than these well-ascertained facts? If we had not known of any other slavemaking ant, it would have been hopeless to have speculated how so wonderful an instinct could have been perfected. Another species (Formica sanguinea) was likewise first discovered by P. Huber to be a slave-making ant. This species is found in the southern parts of England, and its habits have been attended to by Mr. F. Smith, of the British Museum, to whom I am much indebted for information on this and other subjects. Although fully trusting to the statements of Huber and Mr. Smith, I tried to approach the subject in a sceptical frame of mind, as any one may well be excused for doubting the truth of so extraordinary and odious an instinct as that of making slaves. Hence I give masters, are much agitated, and defend the nest. When the nest is much disturbed, and the larvæ and pupa are exposed, the slaves work energet ically with their masters in carrying them away to a place of safety. Hence it is clear that the slaves feel quite at home. During the months of June and July, in three successive years, I have watched for many hours several nests in Surrey and Sussex, and never saw a slave either leave or enter a nest. As, during these months, the slaves are very few in number, I thought that they might behave differently when more numerous, but Mr. Smith informs me that he has watched nests at various hours during May, June, and August, both in Surrey and Hampshire, and has never seen the slaves, though present in large numbers in August, either leave or enter the nest. Hence he considers them as strictly household slaves. The masters, on the other hand, may be constantly seen bringing in materials for the nest, and food of all kinds. During the present year, however, in the month of July, I came across a community with an unusually large stock of slaves, and I observed a few slaves mingled with their masters leaving the nest, and marching along the same road to a large Scotch fir-tree, twenty-five yards distant, which they ascended together, probably in search of aphides or cocci. According to Huber, who had ample opportunities for observation, in Switzerland, the slaves habitually work with their masters in making the nest, and they alone open and close the doors in the morning and evening; and, as Huber expressly states, their principal office is to search for aphides. This difference in the usual habits of the masters and slaves in the two countries probably depends merely on the slaves being captured in greater numbers in Switzerland than in England. "One day I fortunately witnessed a migration of F. sanguinca from one nest to another, and it was a most interesting spectacle to behold the masters carefully carrying (instead of being carried by, as in the case of F. rufescens) their slaves in their jaws. Another day my attention was struck by about a score of the slave-makers haunting the same spot, and evidently not in search of food: they approached, and were vigorously repulsed by an independent community of the slave species (F. fusca), sometimes as many as three of these ants clinging to the legs of the slave-making F. sanguinea. The latter ruthlessly killed their small opponents, and carried their dead bodies as food to their nest, twenty-nine yards distant, but they were prevented from getting any pupae to rear as slaves. I then dug up a small parcel of pupa of F. fusca from another nest, and put them down on a bare spot near the place of combat; they were eagerly We can perhaps best convey to our readseized and carried off by the tyrants, who per-ers a clear view of Mr. Darwin's chain of haps fancied that, after all, they had been victorious in their late combat. "At the same time I laid on the same place a small parcel of the pupe of another species (F. flava), with a few of these little yellow ants still clinging to the fragments of the nest. This is sometimes, though rarely, made into slaves, as has been described by Mr. Smith. Although so small a species, it is very courageous, and I have seen it ferociously attack other ants. In one instance I found to my surprise an independent community of F. flava under a stone beneath a nest of the slave-making F. sanguinea, and when I had accidentally disturbed both nests, the little ants attacked their big neighbors with surprising courage. "Now I was curions to ascertain whether F. sanguinea could distinguish the pupae of F. fusca, which they habitually make into slaves, from those of the little and furious F. flava, which they rarely capture, and it was evident that they did at once distinguish them, for we have seen that they eagerly and instantly seized the pups of F. fusca, whereas they were much terrified when they came across the pupa or even the earth from the nest of F. flava, and quickly ran away; but in about a quarter of an hour, shortly after all the little yellows ants had crawled away, they took heart and carried off tho pupx. reasoning, and of our objections to it, if we set before them, first, the conclusion to which he seeks to bring them; next, the leading propositions which he must establish in order to make good his final inference; and then the mode by which he endeavors to support his propositions. The conclusion, then, to which Mr. Darwin would bring us is, that all the various forms of vegetable and animal life with which the globe is now peopled, or of which we find the remains preserved in a fossil state in the great Earth-Musuem around us, which the science of geology unlocks for our instruction, have come down by natural succession of descent from father to son,—“ animals from at most four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or less number" (p. 484), as Mr. Darwin at first somewhat diffidently suggests; or rather, as, growing bolder when he has once pronounced his theory, he goes on to suggest to us, from one single head : "One evening I visited another community of "Analogy would lead me one step further, F. sanguinea, and found a number of these ants namely, to the belief that ALL ANIMALS and returning home and entering their nests, carry-PLANTS have descended from some one protoing the dead bodies of F. fusca (showing that type. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. it was not a migration) and numerous pupa. Nevertheless, all living things have much in comI traced a long file of ants burthened with this mon in their chemical composition, their germibooty for about forty yards to a very thick clump nal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their of heath, whence I saw the last individual of F. laws of growth and reproduction. . . . Therefore sanguinea emerge, carrying a pupa, but I was I should infer from analogy that probably all not able to find the desolated nest in the thick the organic beings which have ever lived on heath. The nest, however, must have been this earth" (man therefore of course included) close at hand, for two or three individuals of F."have descended from some one primordial form fusca were rushing about in the greatest agita- into which life was first breathed by the Creation, and one was perched motionless with its tor."-P. 484. own pupa in its mouth on the top of a spray of heath, an image of despair over its ravaged home."-P. 219, 223. This is the theory which really pervades the whole volume. Man, beast, creeping Now, all this is, we think, really charming thing, and plant of the earth, are all the linwriting. We feel as we walk abroad with eal and direct descendants of some one inMr. Darwin very much as the favored object dividual ens, whose various progeny have of the attention of the dervise must have felt been simply modified by the action of natural when he had rubbed the ointment around his and ascertainable conditions into the multieye, and had it opened to see all the jewels, form aspect of life which we see around us. and diamonds, and emeralds, and topazes, and This is undoubtedly at first sight a somerubies, which were sparkling unregarded be- what startling conclusion to arrive at. To neath the earth, hidden as yet from all eyes find that mosses, grasses, turnips, oaks, save those which the dervise had enlightened. worms, and flies, mites and elephants, inBut here we are bound to say our pleasure fusoria and whales, tadpoles of to-day and terminates; for when we turn with Mr. Dar-venerable saurians, truffles and men, are all win to his "argument," we are almost immediately at variance with him. It is as an argument" that the essay is put forward; as an argument we will test it. equally the lineal descendants of the same aboriginal common ancestor, perhaps of the nucleated cell of some primæval fungus, which alone possessed the distinguishing honor of |