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Article XVIII.— THE ANTS OF JAPAN. 

 By William Morton Wheeler. 

 Plate XLI. 



The following paper is based on a larger collection of ants made 

 by Mr. Hans Sauter, mainly at Okayama, Kanagawa, and Yamanaka 

 during the summer of 1904 and the spring of 1905 and sent me by 

 Mr. Alan Owston of Yokohama, and some smaller collections from 

 Misaki and other localities, sent me by Professor J. F. Abbott and Dr. 

 W. H. Ashmead. Although this material has enabled me to recognize 

 a number of the forms described by previous myrmecographers and to 

 add several new ones, it is nevertheless true that our knowledge of 

 the Japanese ant -fauna still remains very meager and unsatisfactory. 

 Of very few of the species are all the castes known, and the published 

 descriptions have often been drawn from a few or even single specimens. 

 Moreover, ants have been collected in only a few localities of the 

 Japanese archipelago. Probably, therefore, the described species and 

 varieties will suffer considerable amendment when more material be- 

 comes available. The Japanese themselves seem to have paid little 

 attention to the ants, unless perchance the results of their studies 

 on these insects are embodied in works in their own language in- 

 accessible to the occidental student. 



Meager as are the materials at hand, however, they nevertheless 

 throw considerable light on the geographical distribution of the 

 Formicidas in Eastern Asia. Forel called attention to the fact that 

 the ant-fauna of Japan "consists of a mixture of palearctic and 

 Malayan stocks, the latter confined for the most part to the southern 

 portion of the archipelago. " He fancied he could detect also "certain 

 very interesting nearctic affinities, for example in Camponotus 

 pennsylvanicus var. japonicus and Formica fnsca var. nipponensis." 

 I believe that these affinities are somewhat doubtful. C. japonicus, 

 being probably as closely related to certain Old World forms of 

 herculeanus as it is to our common North American forms, should 

 probably constitute a distinct subspecies of herculeanus independent 

 of pennsylvanicus , and F. nipponensis is certainly as distinct from 



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