You May Play The Piano, Or The Violin, Or Knock With A Hammer, Or Shout Your Loudest, She Will Take No Notice, No More Than If She Actually Had No Ears At All.

Are you, therefore, to conclude she does not hear you?

As well conclude that people do not hear the thunder because they do not shout in answer to it. Such noises simply do not concern her, and she takes no notice. Now, though her eyes be closed, let a strange dog run in, and at the light pad pad of his feet, scarcely audible on the carpet, she is up in a moment, blazing with wrath. That is a sound that interests her. So, too, perhaps, it may be with ants and bees, who may hear and see, and yet take no apparent notice because the circumstances are not interesting, and the experiment is to them unintelligible. Fishes in particular have been often, I think, erroneously judged in this way, and have been considered deaf, and to have little intelligence, while in truth the fact is we have not discovered a way of communicating with them any more than they have found a way of talking with us. Fishes, I know, are keener of sight than I am when they are interested, and I believe they can hear equally well, and are not by any means without mind. These ants that acted so foolishly to appearance may have been influenced by some former experience of which we know nothing; there may be something in the past history of the ant which may lead them to profoundly suspect interference with their path as indicative of extreme danger. Once, perhaps, many ant-generations ago, there was some creature which acted thus in order to destroy them. This, of course, is merely an illustration put forward to suggest the idea that there may be a reason in the brain of the ant of which we know nothing. I do not know that I myself am any more rational, for looking back along the path of life I can see now how I turned and twisted and went to the right and the left in the most crooked manner, putting myself to endless trouble, when by taking one single step straight forward in the right direction, if I had only known, I might have arrived at once at the goal. Can any of us look beyond the little ridge of one day and see what will happen the day after? Some hours afterwards, towards evening, I found the ants were beginning to get over their difficulty. On one side an ant would go forward in a half-circle, on the other another ant would advance sideways, and meeting together they would touch their antennae, and then the first would travel back with the second, and so the line was reestablished. It was very much as if two batsmen at opposite wickets should run forward each halfway, and after shaking hands and conversing, one of them should lead the other safely over.

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