43^ ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS. [DeC, *II 



That part of his work on the habits of spiders and ants 

 necessitating field observations was done ahnost wholly in the 

 summers. As he wrote in one of the prefaces quoted above : 



"The duties of my calling in a large city have held me rigorously 

 away from the open country except during two months of the year. 

 Summer vacations, and such leisure hours as a most busy life would 

 allow, have been given to the pleasant task of following my little 

 friends of the aranead world into their retreats, and watching at the 

 doors of their fragile domiciles for such secrets of their career as 

 they might happen to uncover. Occasional excursions at other times 

 were unavoidably brief, and often broken ofif at the point of promised 

 discoveries. I have, in part, indeed, overcome this obstacle by trans- 

 porting and colonizing specimens, and by directing the observations 

 of others. But, at the best, artificial conditions fall short of Nature's 

 fulness, and no faithfulness of assistants can quite equal personal 

 investigations." 



So in August, 1876, he camped on Brush Mountain, near 

 Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, to obtain the results recorded 

 in his Mound-Making Ants of the Alleghenies, their Architec- 

 ture and Habits (1877). Three weeks of the summer of 1877, 

 spent near Austin, Texas, furnished much of the material for 

 The Natural History of the Ai^ricultural Ant of Texas, A 

 Monograph of the Habits, Architecture and Structure of 

 Pogonouiyrmcx Barbatus (1879), recording his conclusion 

 that "I do not believe that the ants deliberately sow a crop, as 



Lincecum asserts but, finally [he thought] 



that there is nothing unreasonable, nor beyond the probable 

 capacity of the emmet intellect, in the supposition that the crop 

 is actually sown" (pp. 38. 39), and for the description of the 

 Basilica Spider and her Snare (1878). The vacation of 1879, 

 in the Garden of the Gods, near Manitou, Colorado, ultimately 

 resulted in The Honey Ants of the Garden of the Gods and the 

 Occident Ants of the American Plains (1882). Of this work. 

 Professor Wheeler wrote (/. c. pp. 367-369). 



"The first to publish a trustworthy account of this, or in fact any 

 of our Myrmecocysti, was McCook. He discovered horti-deorum in 

 the Garden of the Gods near Manitou, Colorado effectively dis- 

 pelled the notion that the repletes manufacture the honey which they 



contain [made] careful dissections and figures of the gaster 



of ordinary workers, semirepletes ("semirotunds") and repletes 



