52 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tunity when the ant was on the glass, and moved the glass with the 

 ant on it about three inches. Now, under such circumstances, if she 

 had been much guided by sight, she could not of course have had any 

 difficulty in finding her way to the nest. As a matter of fact, however, 

 she was entirely at sea, and, after wandering about for some time, got 

 back to the nest by another and very round-about route, I then again 

 varied the experiment as follows : I placed the food in a small china 

 cup on the top of the pencil, which ihus formed a column seven and 

 a half inches high. When the ant once knew her way, she went very 

 straight to and from the nest. This puzzled her very much ; she went 

 over and over the spot where the pencil had previously stood, retraced 

 her steps several times almost to the nest, and then returned along 

 the old line, showing great ijerseverance, if not much power of vision. 

 I then moved the pencil six inches. She found the pencil at last, but 

 only after many meanderings. 



I then repeated the observation on three other ants, with the same 

 result; the second was seven minutes before she found the pencil, and 

 at last seemed to do so accidentally; the third actually wandered 

 about for no less than half an hour, returning iip the paper bridge 

 several times. 



Let us compare this relatively to man. An ant measuring say 

 one-sixth of an inch, the pencil, being seven inches high, is conse- 

 quently forty-two times as long as the ant. It bears, therefore, some- 

 what the same relation to the ant as a column two hundred and fifty 

 feet high does to a man. The pencil having been moved six inches, 

 it is as if a man in a country he knew well would be puzzled at being 

 moved a few hundred feet, or, if put down in a square containing less 

 than an acre, could not find a column two hundred and fifty feet high, 

 that is to say, higher than the Duke of York's column. 



Another evidence of this consists in the fact that if, when my L. 

 nigers were carrying ofi" food placed in a cup on a piece of "board, I 

 turned the board round so that the side which had been turned tow- 

 ard the nest was away from it, and vice versa, the ants always re- 

 turned over the same track on the board, and consequently directly 

 away from home. If I moved the board to the other side of my arti- 

 ficial nest, the result was the same. Evidently they followed the road, 

 not the direction. 



It is remarkable that we do not even now know exactly how an 

 ants' nest is begun. Whether they always commence as a colony 

 from some older establishment ; whether wandering workers w^io 

 chance to find a queen under certain circumstances remain with her 

 and begin a new nest ; or whether the queen ant, like the queen 

 wasp, forms a cell for herself, and then brings up a few workers, who 

 afterward take upon themselves the labors of the family, as yet we 

 know not. When once started, the communities last for years, being 

 kept up by a succession of individuals. The queens themselves 



