16 A NATURALIST IN HIMALAYA 



ant's head and elevated from off the ground. It is 

 thus often very difficult to grasp, and places the ant at 

 a mechanical disadvantage, but in no other position is 

 the ant able to carry it. I have watched the ants 

 persistently struggling with the seeds in the endeavour 

 to obtain a suitable grasp. They often display much 

 cleverness and determination in the way they seize 

 the seed, first at one point, then at another point, and 

 test it in every direction before they finally reject it as 

 an unsuitable load. Nevertheless, numbers of seeds 

 are cast aside, not because they are unwholesome food, 

 but because they cannot be carried. 



Messor, like the harvesters of Europe and America, 

 not only picks up fallen seeds from off the ground, 

 but ascends the plants and cuts off both ripe and 

 unripe seeds with its mandibles. But I doubt very 

 much if, like some ants, they ever employ so intelli- 

 gent a division of labour as to detail certain of the 

 community for the purpose of cutting and dropping to 

 the ground ripe seeds, and assign to others the duty 

 of carrying the fallen seeds away. Certainly when 

 I placed some food in a shallow watch-glass fixed to 

 the summit of a perpendicular stick close to the nest, 

 the ants that climbed into the watch-glass never threw 

 down fragments to those below, but each one carried 

 its own little load along the difficult journey round the 

 edge of the watch-glass, down the stick, and back to 

 the nest ; yet in this experiment they might have 

 expected to learn how much better a policy it would 

 have been for them to divide their toil, as many of 

 them, while struggling with their loads along the 

 edge of the watch-glass, overbalanced and tumbled 

 to the ground, and thus had a practical lesson in the 



