SUPPLYING THE COMMUNAL RATIONS 



Thus the sober and well -attested facts of scientific 

 truth prove stranger than the widest stretch of fancy 

 would have dared to invent. Even in the face of un- 

 impeachable testimony, one finds one's self startled and 

 wellnigh staggering before such a remarkable instinct 

 in an insignificant insect. 



In the summer of 1880 my attention was called by the 

 Rev. George K. Morris to a small ant \vhich he had 

 discovered at Island Heights, a seaside settlement on 

 Toms River, New Jersey. I recognized it as a species of 

 Atta which I believed to be new, and gave it the specific 

 name of Septentrionalis. 1 



I was so strongly impressed by the appearance of this 

 tropical species so far north that I at once visited Island 

 Heights to study the insect in site. I found that the 

 ants harvested the needle-like leaves of the pine, which 

 were borne into their nests and treated in a way quite 

 like that observed by the Texas Atta, but on a great- 

 ly reduced scale. The nests examined were without 

 an exterior mound. A single gate communicated with a 

 short tubular gallery with a small spherical vestibule, 

 which again opened into a similar but larger cave three 

 inches in diameter. Hanging to the roots that thread- 

 ed this cave were several masses of gray leaf-pulp, the 

 analogues of those in the fungus gardens of Atta fervens. 

 As one contrasted the extensive excavations and the 

 formidable and vigorous communes of the Texas species 

 with the small numbers, slight excavations, and sluggish 

 movements of these Northern allies, he could not for- 

 bear the thought that the New Jersey colonies of 

 Trachymyrmex septentrionalis are the feeble remnant of 



1 Professor Wheeler has placed it in the genus Trachymyrmex 

 (T. septentrionalis McCook). 



99 



