3682 The Zoologist — September, 1873. 



In the second instance seeds found an inch and a half below the 

 surface of the ground on the 29th of December, 1871, and sowed in 

 ' England on the 18th of June, 1872, came up in large numbers ten 

 days afterwards. Some seeds had the radicle gnawed ofl' at its 

 base, and these were sometimes brought into the sunshine, and after 

 being thoroughly dried or malted, their starch being converted into 

 sugar, they were again taken into the recesses of the nest. Seeds 

 thus malted are devoured by the ants with great avidity. 



" It is, however, certain that, though a few individual seeds may sprout 

 in the nests from time to time, either with or without the concurrence of 

 the ants, the great mass remains for many weeks, or even months, quite 

 intact, neither decaying nor germinating ; whereas everyone knows that, if 

 a quantity of seeds are placed in the soil in a moist and warm place, all the 

 seeds that are of one kind will almost simultaneously begin to grow after 

 the lapse of a fixed interval." — P. 26. 



I have found in so many works accounts of "the battles of the 

 ants" that the part of Mr. Moggridge's work which treats of these 

 wars contains little that is positively new to me, or will be so to 

 many of my readers; yet the narrative which I extract below has 

 another interest — it shows that the harvesting economy of ants, the 

 collecting and storing grain, the disposition to plunder the posses- 

 sions of others or to defend their own, are the inciting causes of all 

 their wars ; our ant-historians, Hiiber, Gould, Latreille, Kirby, 

 and others, who constitute themselves authorities on the events of 

 the wars, have failed to see the casus belli, the real object of the 

 belligerents : had it been otherwise they could not have doubted 

 that the ancients were correct in all their assertions, still less would 

 they have called in question the wisdom of Solomon. Like the ento- 

 mologists I have named, Mr. Moggridge was an eye-witness of these 

 combats, and also of the marauding spirit and doings in which the 

 wars originated. I should call them campaigns rather than battles, 

 seeing that the ants sometimes would carry on the war day after 

 day, week after week; a campaign, the events of which were duly 

 noted, lasted forty-six days, namely, from the 18th of January to 

 the 4th of March, both inclusive. He visited the seat of war twice 

 a week for six weeks, and, constituting himself "our special cor- 

 respondent," gives the following description : — 



"An active train of ants, nearly resembling an ordinary harvesting train, 

 led from the entrance of one nest to that of another lower down the slope 



