ON THE HABITS OF ANTS. 



55 



paper bridges, I proceeded as follows : Any friends who came with 

 her were excluded from the bridges when she was on them. If she 

 was not there, as soon as a friend arrived at the bridge <?, I took up e 

 in my fingers and rubbed it lightly, with a view of removing or blur- 

 ring the scent ; and as soon as the ant arrived on d I took up the 

 bridge c, and put it across the chasm from d to h'. Now, if the ant 

 went by description, she would of course cross e to b. If, on the 



(-) 



other hand, she went by scent, then she would be at the least as 

 likely to go over c to b'. The results were that, out of about one hun- 

 dred and twenty friends who passed over J, only twenty went to the 

 food, while nearly one hundred passed over c to the empty glass. 

 In this case the friends generally came more or less in sight of one 

 another to the bridge c, and, once there, could hardly avoid arriving 

 either at b or b'. I therefore modified the experiment as follows : I 

 established and endowed an ant as before, imprisoning the friends 

 who came with her. When she got to know her way thoroughly, 

 I allowed her to return to the nest on her own legs, but as soon 

 as she emerged again I took her up and transferred her to the 

 food. 



Under these circumstances, as will be seen, very few ants indeed 

 ever found their way to the food. I began this at 5.30, when she 

 retuimed to the nest. At 5.34 she came out with no less than ten 

 friends, and was then transferred to the food. The others wandered 

 about a little, but by degrees returned to the nest, not one of them 

 finding her way to the food. The first ant took some food, returned, 

 and again came out of the nest at 5.39 with eight friends, when ex- 

 actly the same happened. She again came out 



