Ants and Some Other Insects: An Inquiry into the Psychic Powers of these Animals with an Appendix on the Pecularities of their Olfactory Sense, translated from the German by Prof. William Morton Wheeler

Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1904. First English edition.

TWO PAPERS ON ANT BEHAVIOR BY SWISS PREDECESSOR OF E. O. WILSON.

15x23 cm gray card covers, green cloth spine, gilt title to spine, bookplate of Merle E. Smith Jr., Ann Arbor, Michigan, April, 1947, to front paste-down, [2], 49 pp. Very good in custom archival mylar cover.

AUGUSTE-HENRI FOREL (1848 – 1931) was a Swiss myrmecologist, neuroanatomist, and psychiatrist notable for his investigations into the structure of the human brain and that of ants. He is considered a co-founder of the neuron theory. In 1866 he began his studies at the University of Zurich's medical school. While at medical school he continued to collect colonies of ants in order to study their physiology, biology, anatomy, systematic and even posology, as he experimented with the effect of some biochemical agents on them. Following a field trip to southern Switzerland in his early twenties, Forel wrote a 450-page essay, Les Fourmis de la Suisse [The Ants of Switzerland], which was first published in 1874. It was commended by Charles Darwin, and was translated into English in 1890.

WILLIAM MORTON WHEELER (1865 - 1937) was an entomologist at the University of Chicago, and later became Curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He specialized in the study of ants, and for his work, Ants of the American Museum Congo Expedition, Wheeler was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1922.