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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ment the enemy fires a shot, the action of 

 the report upon the "telemeter" marks 

 the distance to a fraction. The instrument 

 is entirely self-acting, easily kept in order, 

 and requires no particular experience or 

 intricate calculations to use it aright. The 

 experiments to which it has been subjected 

 in Prussia and iu some other countries are 

 stated to have been completely successful 

 as regards cannon. Experiments in the 

 rifle-grounds are still going on. Even 

 should the invention be confined to artil- 

 lery, its effect must be tremendous, consid- 

 ering the present deadly efficiency of fire- 

 arms. One of its principal advantages, it 

 is supposed, will be to enable gunners in a 

 coast-battery to determine the position of 

 a hostile ship a calculation hitherto fraught 

 with special difficulty. 



Sir Joha Lubbock on the Habits of Ants. 



Sir John Lubbock still continues his ob- 

 servations of ants, and at a recent meeting 

 of the Linnean Society of Loudon read a 

 paper in which he treated 1. Of the power 

 of intercommunication among ants ; 2. 

 Their organs of sense; 3. Their affection 

 or regard for one another. The results are 

 chiefly negative, contradicting many gen- 

 erally-received opinions. To test the ants' 

 power of communicating information to one 

 another, the author had a glass box for the 

 " nest," so that he could watch what was 

 done inside. This was placed on a pole. 

 On the other side of the pole was a board 

 iutended as a promenade for the ants. Near 

 to this were three pieces of glass, connected 

 with the board by strips of paper. On one 

 of the pieces of glass was placed a collec- 

 tion of food, and on the other two there 

 was nothing. Two ants were taken and 

 marked with spots of color, as in former 

 observations, so that they should be readily 

 recognized. These were both taken, one 

 after the other, to the store of food, and 

 were guided and taught their way to the 

 nest. They soon learned their way to and 

 from the nest to the food-supply, coming 

 out of the door along the outside to the 

 pole, around that, across the board, along 

 the paper bridge, and so to the glass that 

 supported the food, and so back again to 

 the nest. Sir John Lubbock's object wa3 

 to watch whether the other ants in the nest 



would find out the food, and, if so, to teat 

 as far as possible whether they found it 

 from information given, or whether they 

 tracked the scent. He devoted certain pe- 

 riods to watching the movements of the 

 ants, counting the number of journeys made 

 by his marked ants, and also recording how 

 many untaught strangers made their way 

 from the board along the right bridge to 

 the food. At his first period of observation 

 he found that, while his marked ants made 

 forty journeys with food, nineteen strangers 

 also came on to the bridges. Of these, two 

 only turned to the food, eight turned to the 

 wrong bridge, and the rest went , straight 

 on. Modifications in the arrangements of 

 the bridges were made in different ways, 

 while the rest of the construction was left 

 unaltered. The observations made on dif- 

 ferent days and during periods of different 

 duration all showed the same result. 



In referring to the organs of sense, Sir 

 John had endeavored to ascertain whether 

 the antennae are organs of hearing or of 

 smell. He had tried them with all sorts of 

 noises he could contrive, and found no re- 

 sults. If ants have hearing, they must be 

 sensible to those vibrations of the air which 

 do not affect the human ear. But he had 

 also tried the antennas with smells, and he 

 found that if he put a fine camel's-hair 

 pencil with a scent on it near one of them 

 it shrank away, and then, if applied to the 

 other, that also turned away. The use of 

 the antennas, however, still needs inves- 

 tigation, and Sir John hopes soon to make 

 further observations. As regards their af- 

 fection for one another, he does not doubt 

 that an ant that dies laden with food will 

 be cared for by its companions; but he 

 brought forward a number of instances in 

 which he had put ants that had suffered 

 immersion in water for periods of from an 

 hour to ten hours in the way of ants that 

 were passing by, and he found almost inva- 

 riably that they took no notice of their un- 

 fortunate brethren. Indeed, the exceptions 

 in which any attention was paid were so 

 few that Sir John said he was disposed to 

 regard these as ants with individual feel- 

 ings, which were by no means those com- 

 mon to the community. It, is understood 

 that the results of Sir John Lubbock's long- 

 continued researches into the habits of bees 



