were located at Wallal, West Australia, owing to the generosity of the Australian government in placing at the disposal of the eclipse expeditions a transport of the Australian navy. Some of the expeditions that accepted this offer of the Australian government are the Crocker eclipse expedition of the Lick Observatory, California, in charge of Professor W. W. Campbell; an expedition from the University of Toronto which included Dr. R. K. Young, of the Dominion Astrophysical Astrophysical Observatory, Victoria, B. C., and an expedition from the Observatory of Perth, West Australia. The transport left Freemantle, the port of Perth, the last of August and will bring members of the expeditions back to that port after the eclipse. The chief object of several of the expeditions was to test the Einstein theory which requires that stars near the sun that are visible when the sun's rays are temporarily blotted out shall be displaced from their normal positions by amounts depending upon their angular distances from the rim of the sun. It will be recalled that the deflections both in direction and amount required by theory were obtained by the British observers at Principe, Africa, and Sobral, Brazil, at the time of the total solar eclipse of May, 1919. This is the first opportunity that has been afforded since that date to obtain an additional test of this prediction of the relativity theory. SCIENTIFIC ITEMS WE record with regret the death of William S. Halsted, professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins Medical School; of Rollin D. Salisbury, professor of geographical geology at the University of Chicago; of Dr. Harold C. Ernst, professor of bacteriology in the Harvard Medical School; of Stephen Smith, distinguished for his contributions to public health, who had nearly reached his hundredth birthday; of Arthur Ransome, the English authority on public health, who died at the age of ninety-two years; of W. H. Hudson, the English ornithologist and writer on natural history, and of Edward M. Eidheer, formerly expert in the Austrian bureau of chemistry. THE British Association for the Advancement of Science held its ninetieth annual meeting at Hull from September 6 to 13 under the presidency of Sir Charles Sherrington, professor of physiology at Oxford and president of the Royal Society. Professor Mangin, director of the Paris Museum of Natural History, presided over the meeting of the French Association for the Advancement of Science held at Montpellier from July 24 to 29.-The Association of German Scientific Men and Physicians held its hundredth meeting at Leipzig from September 18 to 24. One of the public addresses was by Professor Albert Einstein. A PRIZE of $25,000 to be awarded annually to a chemist of the United States for contributions to chemistry was announced by the Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation of New York, at the recent Pittsburgh meeting of the American Chemical Society. THE French Senate has unanimously voted 2,000,000 francs to observe the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Louis Pasteur, which will take place this year. The Senate in voting the appropriation described Pasteur as the "symbol of French science."' THE late Prince of Monaco has bequeathed sums of one million francs each to the Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Medicine, the Institut Océanographique, the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine of Paris, and the Musée Océanographique of Monaco. THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY NOVEMBER, 1922 SOCIAL LIFE AMONG THE INSECTS' By Professor WILLIAM MORTON WHEELER LECTURE IV-ANTS, THEIR DEVELOPMENT, CASTES, NESTING AND FEEDING HABITS N one occasion several years ago when I was about to lecture ΟΝ on ants in Brooklyn, a gentleman introduced me to the audience by quoting the sixth to eighth verses of the sixth chapter of Proverbs, and then proceeded in utter seriousness to give an intimate account of their author. He said that Solomon was the greatest biologist the Hebrews had produced, that he had several large and completely equipped laboratories in which he busied himself throughout his reign with intricate researches on ant behavior and that the 700 wives and 300 concubines mentioned in the Bible were really devoted graduate students, who collaborated with the king in his myrmecological investigations. The gentleman deplored the fact that the thousand and one monographs embodying their researches had been lost, and concluded by saying that he was delighted to introduce one who could supply the missing information. As he had consumed just forty-three minutes with his account of Solomon and his collaboratrices, I had to confess my inability to "deliver the goods" in the remaining seventeen. From what recondite sources of biblical exegesis the Brooklyn gentleman drew his information I have never been able to ascertain, but I am sure that Solomon's few myrmecological comments, which have come down to us from about 970 B. C., are very accurate-far more accurate than that story of Herodotus, written some 500 years later, of the gold-digging ants of India, which were as large as leopards, and whose hides were seen by Nearchus in the camp of Alexander the Great, and whose horns were mentioned by Pliny as hanging, even in his time, in the temple of Hercules at Erythra. 1 Lowell Lectures. Vol. XV.-25. 386 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY This and the many other ant stories invented or disseminated by ancient and modern writers are certainly not devoid of interest, but the actual behavior of the insect is so much more fascinating that you will pardon me for not dwelling on them. The Formicidæ constitute the culminating group of the stinging Hymenoptera and have attracted many investigators for more than a century and especially during the past thirty years. Unlike the honeybee these insects make no appeal to our appetites nor even to that vague affection which we feel for most of the common denizens of our forests, fields and gardens, but only to our inquisitiveness and anxiety. Hence the vast literature which has been written on the ants may be said to have been prompted by scientific, philosophic or mere idle curiosity or by our instinct of self-preservation. In the presence of the ant we experience most vividly those peculiar feelings which are aroused also by many other insects, feelings of perplexity and apprehension, which Maeterlinck has endeavored to express in the following words: "The insect does not belong to our world. Other animals and even the plants, despite their mute lives and the great secrets they enfold, seem not to be such total strangers, for we still feel in them, notwithstanding all their peculiarities, a certain terrestrial fraternity. They may astonish or even amaze us at times, but they do not completely upset our calculations. Something in the insects, however, seems to be alien to the habits, morals and psychology of our globe, as if it had come from some other planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insensate, more atrocious, more infernal than our own. With whatever authority, with whatever fecundity, unequalled here below, the insect seizes on life, we fail to accustom ourselves to the thought that it is an expression of that Nature whose privileged offspring we claim to be. No doubt, in this astonishment and failure to comprehend, we are beset with an indefinable, profound and instinctive uneasiness, inspired by beings so incomparably better armed and endowed than ourselves, concentrations of energy and activity in which we divine our most mysterious foes, the rivals of our last hours and perhaps our suc cessors. . The similarities which the ants, as one of several families of aculeate or stinging Hymenoptera, necessarily bear to the wasps and bees, are so overlaid by elaborate specialization and idiosyncrasies that their primitive vespine characters are not very easily detected. I wish to dwell on some of these specializations, but before doing so, it will be advisable to give under separate captions a brief summary of what I conceive to be the fundamental peculiarities of the ants: |