240 EXPERIMENTS AS TO POWERS. 



them down on the top of the slope, whence they 

 rolled to the bottom, where another relay of labourers 

 picked them up and carried them to the new burrow. 

 It was amusing to watch the ants hurrying out with 

 bundles of food, dropping them over the slope, and 

 rushing back immediately for more.' 



With reference to these interesting statements, I 

 tried the following experiment : — 



October 15 (see Fig. 10).— At a distance of 10 

 inches from the door of a nest of Lasius niger I fixed 



Fig- 10. an upright ash wand 3 feet 6 inches 



high (<x), and from the top of it 



I suspended a second, rather shorter 



wand (6). To the lower end of this 



d second wand, which hung just over the 



I 1 *' entrance to the nest (c), I fastened 



a flat glass cell {d) in which I placed a number of larvae, 

 and to them I put three or four specimens of L. niger. 

 The drop from the glass cell to the upper part of the 

 frame was only ^ an inch ; still, though the ants 

 reached over and showed a great anxiety to take this 

 short cut home, they none of them faced the leap, but 

 all went round by the sticks, a distance of nearly 7 

 feet. At 6 p.m. there were over 550 larvae in the glass 

 cell, and I reduced its distance from the upper surface 

 of the nest to about f of an inch, so that the ants 

 could even touch the glass with their antennae, but 

 could not reach up nor step down. Still, though the 

 drop was so small, they all went round. At 1 1 p.m. the 



