AXTS AND ANT LIFE. Ill 



foresee that, in spite of the dark clouds, it would not rain ! 

 An army of Amazons was overtaken by a storm accom- 

 panied by sudden and heavy rain when thirty yards from 

 their nest. They turned back without attaining their 

 object, and arrived at their nest in great disorder when the 

 chief mischief was done. On the other hand an expedition of 

 the sanguine ants was, under similar circumstances, continued. 

 Sudden storms surprise the ants, but those which approach 

 slowly are discovered and avoided. The way in which an 

 ant train returning from a plundering expedition, laden with 

 stolen goods, may blunder as to its road back will be told 

 later. 



If the harvesting and storing of grain be the fashion 

 among many species of ants in Southern Europe, this is 

 naturally even more the case in hot or tropical lands. The 

 activity of the Brazilian Sa-uba ants in this direction has 

 already been spoken of. But in addition to these there are 

 a good many other tropical and harvesting species, the num- 

 ber of which already discovered in the whole world Mogg- 

 ridge puts at nineteen. Dr. Delacour (" Rev. Zool.," May, 

 1848, 1849,) describes a giant ant of New Grenada, named 

 Arieros by the natives, which emptied for him a whole sack 

 of wheat during a single night. Lieutenant-Colonel Sykes 

 speaks as follows of the Indian JEcodoma, or Atta providens, 

 which does much harm in gardens and fields by its thefts of 

 seeds ("Descr. of New Indian Ants" in "Trans, of the Ent. 

 Soc.," 1836, p. 103): "In my morning walk I observed 

 more than a score of little heaps of grass-seeds (Panicum) in 

 several places on uncultivated land near the parade-ground; 

 each heap contained about a handful. On examination I 

 found they were raised by the above species of ant, hundreds 

 of which were employed in bringing up the seeds to the sur- 

 face from a store below ; the grain had probably got wet at 

 the setting-in of the monsoon, and the ants had taken 

 advantage of the first sunny day to bring it up to dry. . . . 

 Each ant was charged with a single seed ; but as it was too 

 weighty for many of them, and as the strongest had some 

 difficulty in scaling the perpendicular sides of the cylindrical 

 hole leading to the nest below, many were the falls of the 

 weaker ants with their burdens from near the summit to the 

 bottom. I observed they never relaxed their hold, and 

 with a perseverance affording a useful lesson to humanity, 



