The Ant's Highway 



ii 



twenty times, and burrows a way somehow in the shady 

 depths below. 



Next, a bunch of thyme crosses the path : and here 

 for a lengthened period the ant goes utterly out of sight, 

 lost in the interior, slowly groping round about within, 

 and finally emerging in a glade where your walking-stick, 

 carelessly thrown on the ground, bends back the grass and 

 so throws open a lane to the traveller. In a straight line 

 the distance thus painfully traversed may be ten or twelve 

 inches ; certainly in getting over it the insect has covered 

 not less than three times as much, probably more now 

 up, now down, backwards and sideways, searching out a 

 passage. 



As this process goes on from morn till night through 

 the long summer's day, some faint idea may be obtained 

 of the journeys thus performed, against difficulties and 

 obstacles before which the task of crossing Africa from sea 

 to sea is a trifle. How, for instance, does the ant manage 

 to keep a tolerably correct course, steering straight despite 

 the turns and labyrinthine involutions of the path? It is 

 never possible to see far in front half the time not twice its 

 own length ; often and often it is necessary to retrace the 

 trail and strike out a fresh one a step that would confuse 

 most persons even in an English wood with which they 

 were unacquainted. 



Yet by some power of observation, perhaps superior in 

 this respect to the abilities of greater creatures, the tiny 

 thing guides its footsteps without faltering down yonder 

 to the nest in the hollow on the bank of the ploughed field. 

 I say by observation, and the exercise of faculties resembling 

 those of the mind, because I have many times tried the 

 supposed unerring instinct of the ant, and found it fail : 

 therefore it must possess a power of correcting error which 



