5o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



Waks. On the Avars of ants a great deal might be said, as the facts 

 of interest in this connection are very numerous ; but for the sake of 

 brevity I shall confine myself to giving only a somewhat meager ac- 

 count. One great cause of war is the plundering of ants' nests by the 

 slave-making species. Observers all agree that, in the case of the so- 

 called Amazon slave-making ant, this plundering is effected by a united 

 march of the whole army composing a nest, directed against some 

 particular nest of the species which they enslave. According to Lespes 

 and Forel, single scouts or small companies are first sent out from the 

 nest to explore in various directions for a suitable nest to attack. These 

 scouts afterward serve as guides to the marauding excursion. When 

 the scouts have been successful in discerning a suitable nest to plunder, 

 and have completed their strategical investigations of the locality to 

 their satisfaction the latter process being often a laborious one, as it 

 has special reference to the entrances of the nest, which are purposely 

 made difficult to find by their architects they return to their own 

 fortress. Forel has seen them then walk about on the surface of this 

 underground fortress for a long time, as if in consultation, after which 

 some of them entered and again came out leading the host of warriors ; 

 these streamed from all the gatew^ays, and ran about tapping each other 

 with their heads and antennae. They then formed into a column, com- 

 posed of betw^een one and two thousand individuals, and set out in 

 orderly march to pillage the nest which had been examined by the 

 scouts. According to Lespes, the column is about five metres long 

 and fifty centimetres wide, marches at the rate of a metre per minute, 

 and, on account of the distance which may have to be traversed, the 

 march sometimes lasts for more than an hour. When they arrive at 

 their destination a fierce battle begins, w^hich, after raging for a time 

 with much slaughter on both sides, generally, though not invariably, 

 ends in the robbers gaining an entry. A barricade conflict then takes 

 place below-ground, and, if the attack proves successful, the slave- 

 making ants again stream out of the plundered nest, each ant carrying 

 a stolen pupa. The Amazons can not climb, and this fact being known 

 to the other ants, when they find that victory is on the side of the 

 enemy, they devote themselves to saving what treasure they can by 

 carrying their pupoe up the grasses and bushes surrounding the nest. 

 When the marauders have obtained all the booty that they can, they 

 set off on their homeward march, each carrying a pupa. They do not 

 always follow the shortest road, but return exactly on the track by 

 which they came, no doubt being guided entirely by the scent left on 

 the ground from their previous march. When they arrive home they 

 commit the pupae to the care of the slaves. Forel found that a par- 

 ticular colony of slave-makers watched by him sent out forty-four ma- 

 rauding expeditions in thirty days, of which number twenty-eight were 

 completely successful, nine partially so, and the remainder failures. 

 The average booty obtained by a successful expedition was one thou- 



