THE HAkl'l- STING ANTS. 



269 



and Africa and presents in the warmer portions of its range, which is 

 now known to extend southward to the Cape of Good Hope, a bewil- 

 dering complex of subspecies and varieties. M. structor seems to be 

 absent in Africa, but ranges through southern Europe and Asia as far 

 as Java. The ancient peoples were undoubtedly familiar with the 

 granivorous habits of these ants and probably also with those of a 

 third species, AL arcnarius, inhabiting the deserts of North Africa. 

 To them- refer the many allusions in the writings of Solomon and the 

 Mischna, and of the classic writers Hesiod, .Esop, /Elian, Plutarch, 

 Orus Apollo, Plautus, Horace, Virgil, Ovid and Pliny. Mediaeval 

 authors, like Aldrovandus and P>acon, merely repeated the accounts of 

 the ancients. The entomologists of the early portion of the last cen- 

 tury, however, failing to find any harvesters 

 among the ants of temperate Europe, began 

 to doubt, or even to deny their existence. 

 This skepticism is much in evidence in the 

 works of Gould (1747), Latreille (1802), 

 Huber (1810), Gene (1845), Kirby and 

 Spence( 1 846 ), and Blanchard( 1871 ). The sub- 

 ject was taken up, however, by Sykes (1829) 

 and Jerdon (1851) in India, by Moggridge 

 ( 1873 ) in southern France and by Buckley 

 (18610), Lincecum (1862), McCook (18770, 

 1879*:), Morris (1880) and Mrs. Treat (1878) 

 in the United States. These authors suc- 

 ceeded in showing that the ancient accounts 

 were correct. For a detailed history of the 

 subject and for extracts from the various 

 authors of antiquity, the reader is referred to 

 Bochart's " Hierozoicon " and to the works of 



Moggridge and McCook. Here I shall confine FIG. 151. Diagram 



. of nest of Oxyopomyr- 



myself to the recent observations, considering mex sa ntschii. (Sant- 



schi.) 

 text. 



Explanation in 



first, in all brevity, the Old World harvesters 

 and concluding with a somewhat fuller ac- 

 count of our American species. 



Sykes was the first of modern observers to describe the storing of 

 seeds by ants. He saw Phcidolc proi'idcns at Poona, India, bringing 

 grass seeds, which had been moistened by the rains, out of the nests 

 and exposing them to the sun to dry. Jerdon confirmed these observa- 

 tions on Ph. providens, Ph. diffnsa and Solenopsis riifa, a subspecies of 

 the tropicopolitan S. geniinafa. He saw the ants not only drying their 

 piles of seeds but also collecting them from different plants and storing 



