110 ANTS AND ANT LIFE. 



their toothed mandibles, and then conveyed them to their 

 mouths. They repeated this often, before they gave place 

 to their comrades. 



It follows from this that harvesting ants can also eat dry 

 substances, and are so far an exception to their fellows, 

 which, as before mentioned, are wont only to lick up fluid 

 or soft bodies. Yet they only take the soft, more or less 

 damp flour from germinating seeds, or from those the ger- 

 mination of which has been delayed, and which have again 

 been dried, while they leave the hard dry flour from ordinary 

 unsoftened grain. Moggridge substantiated this interesting 

 fact by his attempts at artificial feeding. They only made 

 an exception in favor of the fatty, oily remains of hemp 

 .seeds ; these were gnawed on all sides, without being 

 softened in water, while under ordinary circumstances the 

 hard husks of the hemp seeds and of most, other grains made 

 this impossible. But if the husks burst owing to germi- 

 nation, the ants could then eat the softened and changed 

 contents. In any case the peculiar parts of the ant's mouth 

 are only fitted, as mentioned before, for taking liquid or 

 soft substances ; but they can very well scrape or scratch 

 little bits of flour off seeds with their hard toothed man- 

 dibles. 



Moggridge has also demonstrated that ants are subject to 

 rror and deception in spite of the instinct bestowed upon 

 them by their creator, which was always to lead them aright, 

 both in the choice of their nourishment and in so many 

 matters of some of which mention has been made. It has 

 already been said that they took china beads for grain. 

 But less pardonable than this is it, that they took into their 

 nests the little egg-like gall-apples of a small Cynips species 

 (Gall wasp), which much resemble the seeds of the Fitmaria 

 capreolata (Fumitory) and put them in their granaries, 

 clearly under the delusion that they were seeds. They are 

 also apt to fall into error with respect to the weather, and 

 it is quite untrue that they can foretell it, as Ebrard main- 

 tains. They turn back home and close the outlets when it 

 rains, but that is all. Forel has often seen the F. rufescens 

 and the F. sanguined overtaken by heavy rain when out on 

 a slave hunt, while he has observed others which were just 

 setting out turn back if the sky was cloudy, and come 

 out again if the sun won the day. They were not able to 



