ANT COMMUNITIES 



cluces a new order into the commune. They take charge 

 of the garden; they feed the larvae; they feed upon the 

 kohlrabi; they begin to enlarge the central chamber, 

 and in seven weeks after the founding of the colony they 

 are out in the open dumping their earth-pellets upon 

 their circular moundlets, and ere long the colony is send- 

 ing out its leaf-cutting excursions. 



Thus we see ant communes, under the exigency of the 

 need of food, developing the habit of what has not 

 inaptly been called mushroom gardening. They have 

 mastered the method of liquid manuring, and of inoculat- 

 ing exhausted "soil" with an infected culture. They 

 have learned the value of triturated vegetable matter as 

 furnishing substance and enrichment for their gardens, 

 and apparently they have found out that for this pur- 

 pose certain plants are more valuable than others. 



If such a principle or practice of plant culture were 

 to be as generally and as faithfully applied to gardening 

 and farming among men, it would need no prophet to 

 predict that a new era would dawn upon the agricultural 

 world, and such abundance would follow as our race has 

 never witnessed. 



Now very naturally arose the inquiry : Whence did the 

 Atta queen obtain the fungus germs with which to stock 

 the original garden? This was solved by Von Ihering 

 in the brilliant discovery that on leaving the parental 

 nest the young queen carries with her in the posterior 

 portion of her oral cavity a very minute pellet of hyphae 

 of Rozites gongylophora, and small fragments of bleached 

 or chlorophylless leaves. This, it is believed, is held in 

 the mouth until she has prepared her foundation cham- 

 ber, when she ejects it, and infects therewith the be- 

 ginning of her fungus garden. 



98 



