ANTS GENERAL INTELLIGENCE. 135 



the resources of the animal, when determined to carry its point, 

 were not exhausted, and by ascending the wall to a certain 

 height, with a slight effort against it, in falling it managed to 

 land in safety upon the table. 



Colonel Sykes was a good observer, so that this state- 

 ment, standing upon his authority, ought not, perhaps, to 

 be questioned. But in all cases of remarkable intelligence 

 displayed by animals, we naturally and properly desire 

 corroboration, however good the authority may be on 

 which the statement of such cases may rest. I will, there- 

 fore, add the following instances of the ingenious and 

 determined manner in which ants overcome obstacles, and 

 which so far lend confirmation to the above account. 



Professor Leuckart placed round the trunk of a tree, 

 which was visited by ants as a pasture for aphides, a broad 

 cloth soaked in tobacco-water. When the ants returning 

 home down the trunk of the tree arrived at the soaked 

 cloth, they turned round, went up the, tree again to some 

 of the overhanging branches, and allowed themselves to 

 drop clear of the obnoxious barrier. On the other hand, 

 the ants which desired to mount the tree first examined 

 the nature of the barrier, then turned back and procured 

 from a distance little pellets of earth, which they carried 

 in their jaws and deposited one after another upon the 

 tobacco-cloth till a road of earth was made across it, over 

 which the ants passed to and fro with impunity. 



This interesting, and indeed surprising observation of 

 Leuckart's is, in turn, a corroboration of an almost 

 identical one made more than a century ago by Cardinal 

 Fleury, and communicated by him to Keaumur, who 

 published it in his THistoire des Insectes ' (1734). 

 The Cardinal smeared the trunk of a tree with birdlime 

 in order to prevent the ants from ascending it ; but the 

 insects overcame the obstacle by making a road of earth, 

 small stones, &c., as in the case just mentioned. In 

 another instance the Cardinal saw a number of ants make 

 a bridge across a vessel of water surrounding the bottom 

 of an orange-tree tub. They did so by conveying a 

 number of little pieces of wood, the choice of which 

 material instead of earth or stones, as in the previous case. 



