ANTS AND APHIDS. I 27 



presenting new lines and new tints and new reflections every 

 instant, the spectacle is one of the most enchanting which 

 can greet the eye of the nature lover or artist. Only an 

 impressionist, and a wise one at that, could represent such 

 a scene, for only such an arist would be able adequately to 

 suggest motion. 



Pictorial art, then, as well as literary art, would have 

 missed much through the non-existence of the grass fam- 

 ily. The world would have been poorer, not only in those 

 food stuffs which renew the exhausted muscle and enable 

 the brain to work to advantage but also in those subtler 

 combinations of matter and force which tend to bring us, 

 through closer harmony with earthly things, into closer 

 harmony- with things divine. 



Ants and Aphids. 



BY EDWARD J. BURNHAM. 



About the first of November, as we were removing a 

 large wooden box from the garden, we found small cavi- 

 ties beneath it which were almost literally packed with the 

 white aphids, or plant lice, that we had long known as be- 

 ing especially cared for by the Yellow Meadow ants. 

 Many of these ants were also beneath the box, and it was 

 evident that the}' had taken their "cows" into winter 

 quarters. 



One warm day in early April I came upon a small boul- 

 der, partly buried in the earth, whose upper surface, slop- 

 ing toward the sun, was roughened by several pits or de- 

 pressions. In these pits, sheltered from the wind and 

 warmed by the sun, were many white aphids, of the same 

 kind as those found beneath the box in the garden. These 

 aphids still have legs and feet, but have nearly lost the use 

 of tlieni through long dependence on the ants, which fur- 



