34 C. H. TURNER. 



6. I have known an ant to regularly drop from the stage with 

 a pupa and carry it to the nest and then return to the island, 

 mount a section lifter, which I presented, and rest quietly thereon 

 until it had been conveyed to the stage. Then it would step off, 

 pick up a pupa and drop from the stage. This was repeated over 

 and over again by the ant. 



More than a quarter of a century ago Lubbock claimed that 

 ants were influenced by the direction of the rays of light. 

 These experiments have been either overlooked or ignored by 

 recent continental writers. Although Sir John Lubbock's experi- 

 ments were not so planned as to exclude the possibility of the 

 effect noticed having been produced by heat or change in the_ in- 

 tensity of light, yet it is hard to see any reason why they should 

 have been so completely ignored by European writers. My ex- 

 periments on the effect of light upon the home-going of ants, 

 which were conducted under perfectly planned conditions of con- 

 trol, resemble very much certain of Lubbock's experiments. 



Two kinds of tests were conducted : experiments with ants 

 working in concert, and experiments with marked individual ants 

 working alone. 



In experiments of the first type a card-board stage was used, 

 from which a card-board incline led down to the island. A 

 1 6 c. p. incandescent lamp was placed near the side to which the 

 inclined plane was attached. After the ants had thoroughly 

 learned the way home, a new incline was attached to the stage on 

 the side opposite the one to which the old incline was still attached. 

 If, after a lapse of five minutes, no ants went down the new in- 

 cline, conditions were considered right for the test. The light 

 was then transferred to the opposite side of the stage. In each 

 test the halting movements of the ants showed that they were 

 much disturbed. In most cases, some of the ants would finally 

 go down the new incline ; and in a few cases, after the lapse of 

 several minutes, all of the ants went down the new incline. The 

 above described experiments with ants working in concert were 

 conducted with several different species. 



The individual experiments to test the same thing were con- 

 ducted with Formica fusca var. snbscricea Say and Myrmica punc- 

 tiventris Rog. The apparatus was arranged in the same manner 



