II FOOD OF INSECTS 55 



a. small number of kinds, and to tropical and warm 

 climates. Research is bringing to light the very 

 interesting fact that as a rule in those countries 

 where the ancients lived and wrote, the harvesters 

 abound to the present day. Recent investigators 

 have discovered them in India, and, to come a little 

 nearer home, in Syria and Palestine. In the two last 

 countries the insects must have existed in striking 

 abundance in former days, and have amassed stores 

 of grain of sufficient size to make them worth col- 

 lecting. This is to be inferred from a passage in the 

 Mishna,* being a quaint bit of legislation deciding the 

 property rights to the ant-stores found in fields of 

 corn, whether they should appertain to the gleaners or 

 the proprietor of the field ; the rights of the poor little 

 collectors themselves seem to have been beyond the 

 pale of consideration. We smile at the scrupulousness 

 of a people who could legislate upon such a subject, 

 one of those pitiful minima which even the Jewish 

 law might surely have passed by. Nevertheless the 

 edict is an important one, showing that these 

 operations of the ants were noticeable enough to call 

 for comment. 



Nor are harvesting ants entirely absent from the 

 European continent. Two species (Atta structor 

 and barbard), being true harvesters, were discovered 

 in the south within recent years by the English 

 naturalist Treherne Moggridge. He watched them 

 gather and transport the seeds of a large variety 

 of plants to their nests, and upon excavating the 

 nests at different periods of the year, he found 

 the garnered grain carefully stowed away for 



