66 



KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[Junk 30, 1882 



The interest of this tablet," says Mariette Pasha, in his 

 Vppendix to the Catalogue of the Boolak Museum, 

 •• centi t« iu the date. Tliis dat<" is not Egyptian ; it is 

 Egypto-Asiatio, as were tlie inhabitants of Tanis, Four 

 hundred years before, a shepherd-king, tho Nubti of our 

 tablet, had endowed the llykshos with a fixed calendar 

 <nAited upon the sacred year of the Egyptians. It is from 

 this calendar that the date of the tablet is taken, so 

 fumishin!^ an additional proof that in Lower I'^gvpt, under 

 Rameses'll., there yet existed a stock of alien races whom 

 tho civilisation of Egypt had not entirely deprived of their 

 autonomy." . 



In other words, the Hykshos calendar was still in use 

 in the time of Rameses II., four hundred years after its 

 iiu<ititution by Sut-aa-peh-peh Nubti. This festival of the 

 erection of the tablet was accordingly said to have taken 

 place in the year of Nubti 400 ; just as an event in the 

 history of a Mohammedan country would be reckoned 

 from the Hegira, or Year of the Flight ; or as an event 

 in the liistory of a Christian country would be reckoned 

 from the Christian era. 



Unfortunately, the regnal year of Rameses II. is not 

 firen ; and there is nothing in the te.vt of the tablet to 

 show at what period in the life of this famous Pharaoh 

 the festival of the tablet was commemorated. We there 

 fore only know that the 400th centenary of the Hykshos 

 era coincided with one of the sixty-seven years of the long 

 reign of Rameses II. The coincidence is too vague to be 

 .ailed a synchronism ; yet, despite its vagueness, it affords 

 \ kind of basis for rough calculation. 

 {To be contintied.) 



HONEY ANTS. 

 By Geiant Allen. 

 t rllE Garden of the Gods in Colorado is a bit of show- 

 I scenery of the true American type— a gi-een amphi- 

 theatre, studded with vast ledges and clilis of red sandstone, 

 ^reathered here and there into chimneys or pi lars, in which 

 a distorted fancy traces some vague resemblance to the 

 sculptured forms of the Hellenic gods. Hither a few 

 years since, Dr. McCook of Philadelphia went on his way 

 to New Mexico, where he wished to study the habits and 

 manners of a famous, but little-known insect the honey 

 ant To his surprise, he accidentally stumbled here upon 

 the very creatures he had set out to iind. There are two 

 kinds of entomologists : one kind, now, let us hope, rai)idly 

 vercin" to extinction, sticks a pin through his specimens, 

 mounts them in a cabinet, gives them systematic names, 

 and then considers that he has performed the whole duty 

 of a man and a naturalist; the other kind, now, let us 

 hope, growing more usual every day, goes afield to watch 

 the very lif<- of the creatures themselves at home, and tries 

 to learn their habits and customs in their own native 

 haunts Dr. McCook belongs to the second class. He 

 forthwith pitched his tent (literally) in the Garden of the 

 (Jodfl, and proceeded to study the honey ants on the 



'''iLike many other ants, these little honey eaters are 

 divided into different castes or classes ; for besides tho 

 Drimary division into queens or fertile females, winged ants 

 or in-Ues and workers or neuters, the la.st-named class is 

 further suWivided u.to three castes of majors, minors, and 

 minims or dwarfs. But the special peculiarity which gives 

 ao much interest to this species is the fact that it possesses, 

 Inoareritly at least, a fourth cast^;, that of the honey- 

 b^rera, whose aMomen is distended till it is almost 



spherical by a vast quantity of nectar stored within it Dr. 

 McCook opened several of the nests, and found these 

 honey-bearers suspended like fiies from the ceiling, to 

 which they clung by their l(>gs and appendages. All over 

 the vaulted dome of the anthill, these little creatures were 

 clustered in numbers, their yellow bodies pressed tight to 

 the roof, while their big round stomachs hung down behind 

 from the slender waist, perfect globes of translucent tissue, 

 showing tho amlicr honey distinctly through the distended 

 skin. They looked like largo wliite currants, or sweet- 

 water grapes ; and as they were actually filled with grape- 

 sugar, the resemblance was really quite as true inside 

 as out. 



Wliere did the honey come from 1 That was the next 

 question. Everybody knows that ants are very fond of 

 sugar, and they often steal tho nectar in flowers which the 

 plant has put there to entice tho fertilising bee. So much 

 damage do they do in this way, that many plants have 

 clothed their stalks with hairs, or sticky glands, on purpose, 

 in order to prevent the ants from creeping up the stem and 

 rifling the nectary. In other cases, however, plants actually 

 lay by honey to allure the ants, when they have anything 

 to gain from their visits, as in the case of those Central 

 American acacias, mentioned by Mr. Belt, which have a 

 nectar-gland on the leaf-stalk to attract certain bellicose 

 ants, which so protect them from the ravages of their leaf- 

 cutting congeners. Of course, everybody has heard, too, how 

 our own species sucks honeydew from the little aphides, or 

 plant-lice, which have often been described as antcowa But 

 it is not in either of these ways that tho honey-ants get their 

 sugar. Dr. McCook had a little trouble in settling this 

 matter at first, for the honey ants are a nocturnal species, 

 and he had to follow them through the thick scrub, lantern 

 in hand ; still, he satisfactorily settled at last that they 

 obtain the nectar from the galls on an oak, where it must 

 simply be exuded as an accidental product of injury. The 

 workers take it home with them, and give it to the honey- 

 bearers, who swallow but do not digest it. They keep it in 

 their crops ready for use, exactly as bees keep it in cells of 

 the honeycomb. When the workers are hungry they 

 caress a honey-bearer with their antennoc, whereupon she 

 presses back a little of the nectar up her throat, and the 

 workers sip it from her mouth. The honey-bearers, in 

 short, have been converted into living honey-jars. _ They 

 are thus passively useful to the community, for in this 

 curiously-ordered commonwealth they also serve who only 

 stand and wait 



How could such a strange result as this have been 

 brought about? Dr. McCook, though not himself an 

 avowjd evolutionist, has supplied us with facts which seem 

 to sugf'est the proper answer to this dillicult question. He 

 has shown that the rotunds (as he calls them) are not, in 

 all probability, a separate; caste, but are merely certain 

 specialised individuals taken at haphazard from the worker- 

 major class. He saw himself in tho nests many worker- 

 majors, which seemed at that moment actually in course of 

 transformation into lioney-bearers. Now, it is easy enough 

 to understand why these social insects should wish to store 

 up food against emergencies. At all times, the qucson, tho 

 youn" female ants, the males, and i\u: grubs or larviu are 

 entirely dependent upon others for support Hence, alike 

 among bees and ants, stores of food are habitually 

 laid by, sometimes- in the form of honey in combs 

 and bee-bread, as with the hive-bee; sometimes in 

 the form of seeds and grains, as with tho harvesting ants. 

 During the winter months or the rainy season, when food 

 fails outdoors, there must be some reservoir at home to meet 

 the demand of the starving community. Under such cir- 

 cumstances, any trick of manner which tended to produce 



