ANENT ANTS. 259 



circular incision on the upper side ; it then takes the edge between its 

 jaws, and, by a sharp jerk, detaches the piece which is about the size 

 of a dime. Sometimes they let the leaf drop to the ground, where a 

 little heap accumulates, until carried off by another relay of workers ; 

 but generally each marches off with the piece it has operated upon, 

 and, as all take the same road to their colony, the path they follow 

 soon becomes smooth and bare, looking like the impression of a cart- 

 wheel through the herbage. The heavily-laden workers troop up and 

 cast their burdens on the hillock ; another relay of laborers place the 

 leaves in position, covering them with a layer of earthy granules, 

 which are brought up one by one from the soil beneath. It has not 

 been shown satisfactorily to what use the leaves are put. It was for- 

 merly supposed that they were consumed as food. Mi". Bates's inves- 

 tigations convinced him that the leaves were used to thatch the domes 

 which cover the entrances to the subterranean dwellings, thereby pro- 

 tecting from the deluging rains the young broods in the nests beneath. 

 Mr. Belt, however, who observed the leaf-cutting ants in Central 

 America, and gives a full and interesting account of them in his " Nat- 

 uralist in Nicaragua," arrives at the conclusion that the leaves which 

 they gather in such enormous quantities are used to form beds for the 

 growth of a minute fungus, on which they and their young live. Fritz 

 Miiller, writing from Brazil {Nature^ vol. x., p. 102), says that he has 

 always held this view, and that an examination of their stomachs un- 

 der the microscope confirms it. 



This ant is so abundant in some districts that agriculture is almost 

 impossible, and wherever it exists it is a terrible pest. It is also 

 troublesome to the inhabitants fi'om its habit of plundering the stores 

 of provisions in houses at night, for it is even more active by night 

 than in the daytime. 



The principal part of the visible work is done by the small-heads 

 (1, Fig. 1), while those which have massive heads, the worker-majors 

 (2), are generally observed to be simply walking about. They are 

 not, in this species, soldiers, for they never fight. The function of 

 superintendence would seem superfluous in a community where all 

 work with precision. They cannot, however, be entirely useless to 

 the community, for the sustenance of an idle class of such bulky indi- 

 viduals would be too heavy a charge for the species to sustain. Prof. 

 Sennichrast, who studied some of the species of CEcodoma in Mexico, 

 is of the opinion that their special role, if they have one, is borne in 

 the excavation of the nest, and in tunneling the galleries, labors which 

 require superior strength and better implements. 



The third order of workers is the most curious. If the main shaft 

 of a mine be probed, a small number of colossal fellows (3, Fig. 1) will 

 slowly begin to make their way up the smooth sides of the mine. In 

 the middle of the forehead is a trim ocellus, or simple eye, of quite 

 different structure from the ordinary compound eye on the sides of the 



