390 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



they changed their skins. They grew very rapidly, and 

 finally assumed the appearance described at p. 248 of ' British 

 Moths;' they "went down" July 24th, 25th and 26th. I 

 occasionally placed a sprig of birch with their food, but it 

 was never eaten by them. I also tried plum. — Henry 

 Miller, jun. 



Harvesting Ants. — Mr. J. Moggridge, in a little book 

 lately published by L. Reeve & Co., has some highly 

 interesting observations on ants, confirming the statements 

 of classical writers as to the storing of grain during the past 

 and present years. We have had brief notices on his disco- 

 veries, but these have been uniformly discredited by the 

 would-be dictators of Entomological Science. Mr. Moggridge 

 has seen ants climbing the stems of cereal and other plants, 

 gathering the seeds, detaching them from the husks, and 

 finally storing them away in granaries. After rain he has 

 seen them bring the seeds from these granaries, spread them 

 in the sun to dry, and again return them to the store-house 

 when in gopd condition. The species on which these 

 observations were made are Pheidole megacephala, Atta 

 Structor, and Atta barbara; the seeds of more than thirty 

 species of plants were found in the granaries, but none 

 of these were cereals. This, however, is not uniformly the 

 case, for, at Hyeies, M. St. Pierre found cereals stored by 

 ants in such quantities that he thinks these ants might cause 

 great loss to cultivators. In accordance with the coarse of 

 all such observations, these facts were known and proclaimed 

 by our remote ancestors, rejected and denied by men whom 

 we consider our scientific instructors, — Latreille, Kirby, 

 Blanchard, and Huber, — and are now in every detail 

 confirmed by observers of unquestionable veracity, and 

 might have been observed without the slightest trouble by 

 every traveller in the South of France. — Edward Newman. 



Trap-door Spiders. — Mr. Moggridge has also turned his 

 attention to these interesting creatures, whose curious nests 

 would have been long since "put down" by scientific 

 authority, had they not been preserved in abundance, and 

 thus become familiar to all our museum men. I extract from 

 Mr. Wallace's notice of the book, in ' Nature,' the following 

 novel particulars. " The nests previously known have a 

 hinged door at the upper end of the tubular nest, but 



