aid which they practise at every stage of their busy and
laborious lives. That mode of life also necessarily resulted in
the development of another essential feature of the life of ants:
the immense development of individual initiative which, in its
turn, evidently led to the development of that high and varied
intelligence which cannot but strike the human observer.(9)

If we knew no other facts from animal life than what we know
about the ants and the termites, we already might safely conclude
that mutual aid (which leads to mutual confidence, the first
condition for courage) and individual initiative (the first
condition for intellectual progress) are two factors infinitely
more important than mutual struggle in the evolution of the
animal kingdom. In fact, the ant thrives without having any of
the "protective" features which cannot be dispensed with by
animals living an isolated life. Its colour renders it
conspicuous to its enemies, and the lofty nests of many species
are conspicuous in the meadows and forests. It is not protected
by a hard carapace, and its stinging apparatus, however dangerous
when hundreds of stings are plunged into the flesh of an animal,
is not of a great value for individual defence; while the eggs
and larvae of the ants are a dainty for a great number of the
inhabitants of the forests. And yet the ants, in their thousands,
are not much destroyed by the birds, not even by the ant-eaters,
and they are dreaded by most stronger insects. When Forel emptied
a bagful of ants in a meadow, he saw that "the crickets ran away,
abandoning their holes to be sacked by the ants; the grasshoppers
and the crickets fled in all directions; the spiders and the
beetles abandoned their prey in order not to become prey
themselves; "even the nests of the wasps were taken by the ants,