40 ANIMAL INTELLiaENCE. 



distant. He poured down their burrows a pint of common 

 brown carbolic acid, mixed with four buckets of water. 

 The marauding parties were at once drawn off from the 

 garden to meet the danger at home, and the whole formi- 

 carium was disorganised, the ants running up and down 

 again in the utmost perplexity. Next day he found them 

 busily employed bringing up the ant-food from the old 

 burrows, and carrying it to newly formed ones a few yards 

 distant. These, however, turned out to be only intended 

 as temporary repositories ; for in a few days both the old 

 and the new burrows were entirely deserted, so that he 

 supposed all the ants to have died. Subsequently, how- 

 ever, he found that they had migrated to a new site, about 

 two hundred yards from the old one, and there established 

 themselves in a new nest. Twelve months later the ants 

 again invaded his garden, and again he treated them to a 

 strong dose of carbolic acid. The ants, as on the previous^ 

 occasion, were at once withdrawn from the garden, and 

 two days afterwards he found ' all the survivors at work on 

 one track that led directly to the old nest of the year before, 

 where they were busily employed in making fresh exca- 

 vations. Many were bringing along pieces of ant-food * 

 from the nest most recently deluged with carbolic acid ta 

 that which had been similarly deluged a year before, and 

 from which all the carbolic acid had long ago disappeared^ 

 ' Others carried the undeveloped white pupae and larvae. 

 It was a wholesale and entire migration;' and the next day 

 the nest down which he had last poured the carbolic acid 

 was entirely deserted. Mr. Belt adds : ' I afterwards found 

 that when much disturbed, and many of the ants destroyed, 

 the survivors migrate to a new locality. I do not doubt 

 that some of the leading minds in this formicarium recol- 

 lected the nest of the year before, and directed the 

 migration to it.' 



Now, I do not insist that the facts necessarily point ta 

 this conclusion ; for it may have been that the leaders of 

 the migration simply stumbled upon the old and vacant 

 nest by accident, and finding it already prepared as a nest,, 

 forthwith proceeded to transfer the food and pupae to it. 

 Still, as the two nests were separated from one another by 



