ANTS AND ANT LIFE. 103 



must have been very generally held in Shakspere's time, for 

 the great bard makes the fool say to Kent, in " King Lear " 

 (act ii., scene 4): " We'll set thee to school to an ant, to 

 teach thee there's no laboring in the winter." The facts 

 given by Huber are perfectly correct, but the deduction 

 therefrom is incorrect. Huber and the earlier opponents 

 did not remember that the ancient stories came to us from 

 Greece and from the East, where the habits of the ants are 

 different from those of the North, in consequence of the 

 difference of the climate. But in the North also we are not 

 quite without harvesting ants, and if Huber had searched 

 more carefully he might have found the solution of the 

 problem on the Petite Saleve, near. Geneva, as Forel did. 

 Of the two chief harvesting species in Europe (Aphcenogaster, 

 or Atta structor, and Atta barbard) the first is found in 

 Switzerland. This species, indeed, there collect different 

 grains, which also serve for food after the starch-flour con- 

 tained in them has been partly turned into sugar as the 

 result of germination. But although the two species named 

 are rare in the North, they are more numerous in Southern 

 Europe and especially on the shores of the Mediterranean, 

 and both Lespes and Moggridge have observed and accurately 

 described their habits. They do not hibernate there, owing 

 to the warmth of the climate, any more than do Northern; 

 ants if they are kept in a warm room, and therefore need 

 the winter-stores which they keep in the interior of their 

 nests in special granaries. Lespes often saw little heaps 

 of refuse in front of their nests, which they had made 

 of the husks after eating the corn, soft and swollen by 

 germination in the interior of the warm, damp nest. At 

 least the little radicle the tenderest and sweetest part of 

 the grain was always, says Lespes, eaten off. Moggridge 

 noticed these same rubbish heaps. In gathering corn they 

 observe, according to Lespes, that great economical principle 

 which plays so large a part in the industrial and general life 

 of man, and which we have learnt to recognise as the chief 

 reason of their successful industry in other ant labors, such 

 as digging, building, earth and leaf carrying, nursing the 

 young, etc. the principle, namely, of division of labor and 

 they carry it so far that if the road from the place where 

 they are gathering their harvest to the nest is very long, 

 they make regular depots for their provisions under large 



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