Wars and Slavery in the Animal Kingdom. 57 



A dog biting the stone thrown at him, in his blind 

 rage acts just as "automatically" as a sanguinea which 

 vents her fury on the edges of a glass tube, so that you 

 can hear the grating noise made by her jaws. And if 

 certain individuals of an ant colony acquire through 

 their sense-experience special dispositions and char- 

 acteristics, which distinguish them from other individ- 

 uals of the same colony, then they act "automatically" 

 as little as dogs or apes, or other higher mammals do. 

 Some remarkable instances of this may find a place 

 here. 



In the observation nest of F. sanguinea described 

 on page 23, some beetles called Dinarda dentata, which 

 I introduced, had at first been received as usual without 

 difficulty as indifferently tolerated guests, and had 

 even propagated in the nest. But several times I put in 

 a little larger Dinarda species (D. Maerkelii), whose 

 usual host is F. rufd, and when finally some small 

 sanguineas and their slaves had succeeded in seizing 

 and killing this beetle, which, as a rule, is unassailable 

 owing to its wedge-shaped body offering scarcely any 

 point of attack, 1 then a number of ants of this colony 

 gradually took a liking to catching Dinar das, which 

 liking proved disastrous also to the smaller Dinarda 

 dentata. Not all the individuals of the different ant 

 species of that colony have acquired this strange 

 passion. Among twelve workers of F. sanguinea 

 which I put from this observation nest into a smaller 

 experimenting nest together with seven Dinarda 



*) See Wasmann, " Dinarda- Arten oder -Rassen," in Wien. Entom. 

 Ztg., 1896, 4th and 5th issue, and "Die Myrmekophilen und Termi- 

 tophilen," p. 435 (Extr. du. Compte rendu du troisieme CongrSs intern, 

 de Zool. Leyden, 1896). 



