ABSTRACT
The third and last and from many points of view the most interesting group of social Aculeates comprises the family Formicidæ, or ants. It is essentially a tropical group and till recently our knowledge of it was so largely confined to the rather small number of species in the north temperate zone, that no comprehensive description was possible. During the past half century, however, Forel, Emery, Ern. André, Santschi, Viehmeyer, Donisthorpe, Crawley, Mann, myself, and others, building upon the foundations laid by Latreille, Frederick Smith and Gustav Mayr, have been endeavouring to complete the taxonomic edifice of the family and to gain such knowledge of the behaviour of the species as was incidentally possible. Though there still remains, of course, a great deal to be done, the data accumulated have, nevertheless, attained imposing dimensions. They are now being used in the production of compendious works, of which several are already accessible to the student. During the past twenty years general, semipopular volumes on ants have been published by Forel in French, by Escherich (1917) and Brun (1924) in German, by Emery in Italian (1915a) and by Donisthorpe (1915) and myself (1910a, 1923) in English. Forel’s “Fourmis de la Suisse” (new edit. 1920) and especially his “Monde Social des Fourmis” (1921–23) cover the field so well that I can find no excuse for devoting this lecture to a survey of the structure and behaviour of ants. I shall take for granted that you have some acquaintance with these insects and shall treat, so far as my time will permit, only a few general matters such as the phylogeny of the family, its known paleontological record and its geographical distribution. In later lectures I shall enter into somewhat greater detail in regard to some other equally controversial matters.
