ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY BULLETIN 



1671 



long legs, lie stood high out of reach of his as- 

 sailants. He was balanced so exactly that the 

 instant a feeling antenna touched a leg, he 

 would lift it out of reach. Even when two or 

 three were simultaneously threatened, he raised 

 them, and at one time he stood perfectly bal- 

 anced on four legs, the other four waving in 

 mid air. But his kismet came with a concerted 

 rush of half a dozen ants, which overbore him, 

 and in a fraction of time his body, with two 

 long legs trailing behind, was straddled by a 

 small worker and borne rapidly away. 



I now flattened myself on an antless area at 

 the edge of the pit and studied the field of bat- 

 tle. In another half-hour the massacre was al- 

 most over. Five double, or often quadruple, col- 

 umns were formed up the sandy cliffs, and the 

 terrific labor of carrying out the dead victims 

 began. The pit was five feet deep, with per- 

 fectly straight sides, which at the rim had been 

 gutted by the rain, so that the}' actually over- 

 hung. Yet the ants which had half climbed, 

 half tumbled their way to the bottom in the 

 wake of their victims, now settled themselves 

 to solving the problem of surmounting these 

 cliffs of loose, crumbling grains, dragging loads 

 which, in most cases, were much heavier than 

 themselves. Imagine a gang of men set to car- 

 rying bundles of one to two hundred pounds up 

 perpendicular cliffs twelve hundred feet in 

 height, and the task of the army ants is made 

 more vivid. So swiftly did they work and so 

 constantly shift their formations and methods 

 of meeting and surmounting difficulties, that I 

 felt as I used to feel when looking at a three- 

 ring circus. I could perceive and record only 

 a small part of the ingenious devices and the 

 mutual assistance and sharing of the compli- 

 cated conditions which arose at every step. 



When two traffic columns reached the summit. 

 three others were forging rapidly ahead. All 

 used a similar method of advance. A group of 

 mixed castes led the way, acting as scouts, sap- 

 pers and miners. They searched out every 

 slope, every helpful step or shelf of sand. They 

 took advantage of every hurdle of white grass- 

 roots as a welcome grip with which to bind the 

 shifting sand-grains. Now and then they had 

 to cross a bare, barren slope with no natural 

 advantages. Behind them pressed a motley 

 throng, some still obsessed with the sapper in- 

 stinct, widening the trail, tumbling down loose, 

 dangerous grains. Some bore the first fruits 

 of victory, small ants and roaches which had 

 been the first to succumb. These were carried 

 bv one, or at most by two ants, usually with the 



prey held in the jaws close beneath the body, 

 the legs or hinderpart trailing behind. In this 

 straddling fashion the burden was borne rap- 

 idly along, an opposite method from the over- 

 head waving banners of the leaf-cutters. 



With these came a crowd of workers, both 

 white and black-headed, and soldiers, all emp- 

 ty-jawed, active, but taking no part in the ac- 

 tual preparation of the trail. This second 

 cohort or brigade had, it seemed to me, the most 

 remarkable functions of any of the ants which 

 I saw during my whole period of observation. 

 They were the living implements of trail mak- 

 ing, and their ultimate functions and distribu- 

 tion were so astounding, so correlated, so syn- 

 chronized with the activities of all the others 

 that it was difficult not to postulate an all-per- 

 vading intelligence, to think of these hundreds 

 and thousands of organisms as other than cor- 

 puscles in a dynamic stream of life controlled 

 by some single, outside mind. 



Here, then, were scores of ants scrambling 

 up the steep uneven sides, over ground which 

 they had never explored, with unknown obsta- 

 cles confronting them at every step. To the eye 

 they were ants of assorted sizes, but as they ad- 

 vanced, numbers fell out here and there and 

 remained behind. This mob consisted of po- 

 tential corduroy, rope-bridges, props, hand- 

 rails, lattices, screens, fillers, stiles, ladders and 

 other unnamable adjuncts to the successful 

 scaling of these apparently impregnable cliffs. 

 If a stratum of hard sand appeared, on which 

 no impression could be made, a line of ants 

 strung themselves out, each elaborately fixing 

 himself fast by means of jaws and feet. From 

 that moment his feverish activity left him; he 

 became a fixture, a single unit of a swaying 

 bridge over a chasm; a beam, an inorganic 

 plank, over which his fellows tramped by hun- 

 dreds, some empty, some heavily laden. If a 

 sudden ascent had to be made, one ant joined 

 himself to others to form a hanging ladder, up 

 which the columns climbed, partly braced 

 against the sandy wall. 



At uncertain, unguarded turns a huge soldier 

 would take up his station, with as many func- 

 tions and duties as a member of the Broadway 

 traffic squad. Stray, wandering ants would be 

 set right by a single twiddle of antennae; an 

 over-burdened brother would be given a help- 

 ing jaw and assisted for some distance to the 

 end of his beat. I was especially interested in 

 seeing, again and again, this willingness to help 

 bear the burdens. It showed the remains of an 

 instinct, inhibited by over-development, by ul- 



