ANTS — WARS. 77 



other out of their nests in a quite friendly way. Forel laid on 

 a table a piece of bark with a nest of the gentle Leptothorax 

 acervorum, and then put on it the contents of another nest of 

 the same species. The last comers were by far the more nume- 

 rous, and soon possessed themselves of the nest, driving out the 

 inmates. But the latter did not know whither to go, and 

 turned back again. They were then seized by their opponents 

 one after the other, carried away as far as possible from the nest, 

 and there put down. The oftener they came back the further 

 were they carried away. One of the carriers arrived in this 

 fashion at the edge of the table, and after it had by means of its 

 feelers convinced itself that it had reached the end of the world, 

 mercilessly let its burden drop into the fathomless abyss. It 

 waited a moment to see if it had attained its object, and then 

 turned back to the nest. Forel picked up the ant which had 

 fallen on the floor, and put it down right in front of the return- 

 ing ant. The latter repeated the same manoeuvre as at first, 

 only stretching its neck further over the edge of the table. He 

 several times reiterated his experiment, and always with the 

 same result. Later the two colonies were shut up together in 

 a glass case, and gradually learned to agree. 



At other times, however, warHke ants show great and 

 needless cruelty to one another : — 



They slowly pull from their victim, that is rendered defence- 

 less by wounds, exhaustion, or terror, first one feeler and then 

 the other, then the legs one after another, until they at last 

 kill it, or pull it in a completely mutilated and helpless con- 

 dition to some out-of-the-way spot where it perishes miserably. 

 Yet some compassionate hearts are to be found among the 

 victors, which only pull the conquered to a distant place in order 

 to get rid of them, and there let them go without injuring 

 them. 



The following account is also taken from Biichner's 

 ^Mind in Animals,' p. 87 : — 



The doors are often guarded by special sentries, which fulfil 

 their important duty in various ways. Forel saw a nest of the 

 Colobopsis truncata, the two or three very small round open- 

 ings of which were watched by soldiers, arranged so that 

 their thick cylindrical heads stopped them up, just as a cork 

 stops up the mouth of a bottle. The same observer saw the 

 Myrmecina Latreillei defend themselves against the invasions 

 of the slave-making Strongylognathus, by placing a worker at 

 each of the Httle openings of the nest, which quite stops up 



