47- .l\TS. 



purplish, while the male is coal-black with white wings. The worker 

 is extremely pugnacious, and, like the female, may he readily distin- 

 guished from the other Camponotine ants by its sickle-shaped, toothless, 

 but very minutely denticulate mandibles. Such mandibles are not 

 adapted for digging in the earth or for handling thin-skinned larvae 

 or pupae and mo\ing them about in the narrow chambers of the nest, 

 but are admirably fitted for piercing the armor of adult ants. \Yc find 

 therefore that the amazons never excavate nests nor care for their own 

 young. They are even incapable of obtaining their own food, although 

 they may lap up water or liquid food when this happens to come in 

 contact with their short tongues. For the essentials of food, lodging 

 and education they are wholly dependent on the slaves hatched from 

 the worker cocoons that they have pillaged from alien colonies. Apart 

 from these slaves they are quite unable to live, and hence are always 

 found in mixed colonies inhabiting nests whose architecture throughout 

 is that of the slave species. Thus the amazons display two contrasting 

 sets of instincts. While in the home nest they sit about in stolid idleness 

 or pass the long hours begging the slaves for food or cleaning themselves 

 and burnishing their ruddy armor, but when outside the nest on one 

 of their predatory expeditions they display a dazzling courage and 

 capacity for concerted action compared with which the raids of san- 

 yitinea resemble the clumsy efforts of a lot of untrained militia. The 

 amazons may, therefore, be said to represent a more specialized and 

 perfected stage of dulosis than that of the sanguinary ants. In attain- 

 ing to this stage, however, they have become irrevocably dependent and 

 parasitic. Wasmann believes that Polycrgus is actually descended from 

 F. sanguinca, but it is more probable that both of these ants arose in 

 pretertiary times from some common but now extinct ancestor. The 

 normal slaves of the European amazons are the same as those reared 

 by sanguined, viz: F. fusca, glcbaria, nibcsccus, cinerea and rnfibarbis; 

 and of these fusca is the most frequent. But the ratio of the different 

 components in the mixed nests is the reverse of that in sanguinea colo- 

 nies, there being usually five to seven times as many slaves as amazon 

 workers. The simultaneous occurrence of two kinds of slaves in a 

 single nest is extremely rare, even when the same amazon colony pil- 

 lages the nests of different forms of fusca during the same season. 

 This is very probably the result of the slaves' having a decided prefer- 

 ence for rearing only the pupae of their own species or variety and 

 eating any others that are brought in. Two slave forms may, however, 

 appear in succession in the same nest. Near Morges, Switzerland, 

 Professor Forel showed me an amazon colony which during the summer 



