Aug. 1, 1868. J 



HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



170 



its antenna;, as though to make it quite comfortable 

 before leaving it. I have often seen two ants tug- 

 ging at the same piece in opposite directions, and 

 alternately dragging each other about ; and a little 

 stone or bit of stick dragged backwards and for- 

 wards in their galleries, first by one ant and then 

 another, before it was brought to the surface. Again 

 they seem to work quite indiscriminately anywhere. 

 One comes out of a gallery with something in its 

 month, runs about with it, puts it down, and seems 

 to have lost itself, then finally disappears down 

 another hole. I have seen them go on excavating 

 at the end of a gallery, not carrying out all the 

 debris, but depositing it a little way behind till they 

 were nearly or quite blocked in, or till the passage 

 had become so narrowed that there was only room 

 for one to pass. 



When I commenced keeping them I was at a loss 

 to know what to feed them with ; I tried them with 

 dead flies, spiders, bits of meat, bread crumbs, and 

 other things, but they did not appear to eat any- 

 thing, and numbers of them died. It was amusing, 

 though at the same time somewhat painful, to see 

 their dead bodies brought out of the works, and 

 laid down at the greatest distance from the entrance. 

 They were all taken to the same spot : no amount 

 of regret seemed to be manifested, they were simply 

 borne along in the jaws of a fellow worker that had 

 somewhere stumbled over the corpse, and deposited 

 in a pile with the corpses of those that had gone 

 before. So they remained for two or three days, 

 but one morning, when I paid my first visit, I was 

 surprised to find that the bodies had also departed — 

 all had vanished. On looking round more closely I 

 found there were a few on the platform, but most 

 at the bottom of the water. I took some of them 

 np and restored them to their former position, and 

 in a very short time they were again seized, dragged 

 up the inside of the glass with great difficulty, then 

 down the outside, across the platform to the verge 

 overhanging the water, and then the ant committed 

 the body of its brother ant to the deep, and went 

 and resumed its work. I tried this several times, 

 each with the same result, and it seems to me to 

 afford good evidence of their possessing a certain 

 intelligence or reason ; as, finding the dead bodies 

 were likely to prove a nuisance so near their habita- 

 tion, they removed them at once to the farthest 

 distance and sank them in the water. 



I have read somewhere that ants from the same 

 nest recognize each other after having been long 

 separated. So far as the experiments which I have 

 made go, they tend to contradict such a statement. 

 Some little time after my family had got established 

 in their new quarters, I introduced two from the 

 original nest; they were instantly recognised as 

 strangers, hunted and driven about, and every ant 

 that came near them endeavoured to capture them. 

 One of them I saw killed by a party of four or five, 



and the other, I have no doubt, shared the same 

 fate, though it escaped for a time by hiding over 

 the platform close to the water. Several times I 

 introduced ants from the same nest, and the same 

 excitement and hunting about was always produced, 

 but I was only once witness to a death. 



This species of ant was, I believe, the Formica 

 fuliginosa, but am not quite certain ; there was also 

 another kind in the same garden, a red ant, probably 

 Formica, ritfa, and one day I put half a dozen of the 

 latter in amongst the former, and the battle that 

 ensued was of the most ferocious character. Their 

 presence seemed to be recognised immediately, or 

 the news of their intrusion must have spread like 

 wildfire, and the proper inhabitants came swarming 

 out of their holes and rushed about in the most 

 rapid and excited manner. They seized immediately, 

 or endeavoured to seize, any of the intruders coming 

 across their path. I remember five between them had 

 taken captive a red ant, one holding on to one of its 

 antenna?, and the other four each to a leg; they were 

 tugging and pulling in opposite and equidistant 

 directions, so that if a line had been drawn from 

 one to another, and so on to the next, it would have 

 described a tolerably correct pentagon, and thus it 

 furnished a fairly good example of the equilibrium 

 of forces, for the unfortunate centre of this com- 

 bination remained at rest, if rest it might by a 

 stretch of the imagination be called. Of course the 

 red ants had no chance against such numbers, and 

 in the course of the day they were all done to death, 

 some of their bodies being cut into pieces. 



Their power of endurance is something remark- 

 able ; they may indeed be said to endure manfully as 

 good soldiers. I noticed one of my tenants that had 

 fixed itself to one of the posterior legs of a red ant 

 that got dragged in the struggle into a drop of 

 water that was splashed on to the platform, and it 

 soon became exhausted. It had not power to take a 

 step, and all its legs seemed useless, but it still 

 held on, and was carried about by its victor com- 

 panions in their attempts to destroy the intruder. 

 After the affray was ended I took it up and dried it, 

 and placed it on the soil inside the case, when it very 

 soon recovered. 



The neuters or wingless ants seemed to take 

 great care generally of the males and females, but 

 not always. I have frequently seen them seize the 

 males and carry them underground when a nest has 

 been disturbed, just in the same way that they carry 

 off the cocoons, but I have also seen them attack 

 the females, and one that had been in the nest only 

 a short time, I found one morning divided into 

 three parts, head, thorax, and abdomen being quite 

 separated. That the female ant after a time divests 

 herself of her wings is a curious fact, and one I 

 have several times seen, but I cannot understand how 

 in any similar way she could resolve herself into the 

 three component parts as stated. 



