umbrageousness of the south, is there no language
in the sounds they utter? Do they not
deliberate whether the summer be indeed gone in
the regions which they still inhabit? Do they
not ask one another whether it is still possible
to stay a little longer, and be contented with the
good things they enjoy? or whether the icy breath
of winter is not even now palpable to them, if
not to men, creeping and soon to be blowing
from afar?—and whether, consequently, it is not
expedient for them all to spread their wings
and fly away to the bright regions where winter
never penetrates? If they do not say these
things, they say something—of that there can
be little doubt; and because we possess no
swallow grammar, and no hirondelle dictionary,
are we not a little too wise in our own
conceit if we assume that no such language is
possible?

If, descending in the scale of creation from
the quadrupeds and birds that emit sounds
which are perfectly audible to themselves and
us—whatever those sounds may mean—to
that lower world of insect life which emits
little and sometimes no sound that our ears
can detect, we may still discover reason to
believe that they may have some power of speech
—possibly by means of sound, possibly by
means of touch and signs. Take bees and
ants as familiar examples. When the bees
in a hive select one particular bee, and station
her at the entrance—like a hall-porter at a
club in Pall-Mall—and assign to her the
duty, which she well performs, of allowing
none but members of the hive to pass in, is it
not certain that the functionary has been chosen
from out the rest, and informed of the wishes
of the community? This cannot be done without
a language of some sort, whether of the
eye, the touch, or the expression of a sound
or series of sounds. When black ants make
war against red ants, for the purpose of taking
the children of the latter into captivity and
making slaves of them, is war declared without
preliminary consultation? and, if not, must
not these belligerent Formicans have some
kind of a language? The battles of the ants
have often been seen, and often described. I
was one day strolling on the wild but beautiful
shore of Loch Eck, in Argyllshire, when I sat
me down to rest by the side of a little rill or
burnie that trickled down a bank, when I
noticed that a large flat stone or slab, that, ages
ago, perhaps, had slidden down from the
mountains—a slab that was about five or six feet
long by about as many wide—was covered with
ants of two species—the one with wings, the
other wingless—and that they were fighting a
desperate battle, a very Waterloo or Sadowa
of carnage. The stone was encumbered with
the dead and dying; battalion charged battalion,
division assailed division, while episodes
of individual bravery—one single combatant
against another—spotted the battle-field. There
were march and countermarch, assault and
defence, retreat and pursuit, and, as far as my
unpractised eye could judge, a considerable
amount of care and attention to the wounded
and disabled. Returning home to my books, I
found a description in Leigh Hunt's Companion
of a similar battle, on the authority of a German
naturalist, named Hanhart, and a still more
interesting description in Episodes of Insect Life,
by Acheta Domestica, both confirmatory of
what I had seen, and both containing particulars
of the mode of battle, which I had been
unable to understand. The puzzle was then, as
it still is, whether these quarrelsome little
Formicans could form themselves into battalions,
arrange plans of attack and defence, appoint
commanders and captains, and play the parts of
Napoleon and Wellington, without some means
of intercommunication of idea, equivalent, in its
results, to human speech? The question cannot
be decided, except inferentially, and by
arguing from the known to the unknown. If
treated in this manner, there is much more to
be said in favour of the proposition that the
Formicans can speak to each other than can be said
against it—especially if, remembering, with
Shakespeare, that there are more things in
heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our
philosophy, we consider, at the same time, that
there may be an infinitude of sounds in nature
which our ears are too dull to hear, and of which
the vibrations are far too faint and delicate to
strike upon the human tympanum.

Without dogmatising on the subject, a
student of nature may be permitted to express his
belief that the all-wise and infinitely beneficent
Creator has not only given to every living
creature, great or small, the capacity for
enjoyment, and the consequent capacity for pain,
but the power of expressing to its own kind
its joy or sorrow, its fears, its wishes, and its
wants; and that man is not so wholly a
monopolist of speech and reason as the philosophers
have imagined. One of our popular living poets
(Charles Mackay) says, in "A Fancy under the
Trees:"

           To everything that lives
           The kind Creator gives
   Share of enjoyment; and while musing here,
           Amid the high grass laid,
           Under your grateful shade,
   I deem your branches, rustling low and clear,
        May have some means of speech
            Lovingly each to each,
   Some power to understand, to wonder, to revere.

Without going to this poetical length in
favour of the trees, or even of the flowers, I
think it may be fairly argued that the non-
existence of speech among animals, and even
among insects, is (to use the Scottish law
phrase) "not proven." The sun may spread
around a very great and glorious radiance, and
a candle may emit a very small glimmer; but
there is light in both cases. Man's reasoning
powers, and the speech that accompanies them,
when compared with the reasoning faculty and
the speech of all the inferior inhabitants of the
globe, may be as greatly in excess of theirs as
the noonday sunshine is in excess of the ray of
a farthing candle; but the least particle of
reasoning power is reason as far as it extends.
What we call instinct is but a kind and degree