Wars and Slavery in the Animal Kingdom. 45 



on the war-path in large serried columns, the sanguine 

 slavemakers, however, the European as well as the 

 North American,^ in smaller, less serried detachments ; 

 both, but especially the Amazons, try to storm the 

 hostile nest by a fierce attack, and to stun the numeri- 

 cally superior foe and to put him to flight by the 

 suddenness of the onslaught. Great success generally 

 attends these tactics. Forel, in his "Fourmis de la 

 Suisse'' (1874), p. 306, has several similar instances, 

 some of which we wish to bring to the notice of the 

 reader. When Forel brought a bag containing a 

 whole colony of meadow ants (F. pratensis), which 

 in size and strength surpass the Amazons, into the 

 neighborhood of an Amazon nest, several of the 

 Amazons at first dashed fiercely into the midst of their 

 numberless enemies; twenty of them were as a rule 

 sufficient to rout fifty times that number of pratensis. 

 Another time an army of Amazons just returning 

 from the pillage of a slave nest were depositing their 

 spoils of ant pupae in their nest, previous to setting 

 out on a new expedition, when Forel at a distance of 

 one meter from their nest and in the path of their 

 expedition emptied a large bag of F. pratensis. In 

 three minutes the whole army of the Amazons had 

 encircled the hostile camp appearing quite unex- 

 pectedly. They stormed it in an instant, drove out 

 the pratensis and ransacked the nest for its cocoons. — I 

 would like to hear of apes ever displaying similar 

 military skill. 



It is characteristic of the military tactics of those 



1) Formica ruhicunda and integra Em. are the principal N. Ameri- 

 can races of the European Formica sanguinea. 



