ANTS AND ANT LIFE 149 



and turned back again to bring fresh booty although many 

 lost their lives. 



The scenes which occur during the marauding excursions 

 are as manifold and as various as during the wars and 

 marauding expeditions of men, and like these might either be 

 sung in the style of the epic poem or written of as in a general's 

 dispatches, if they did not concern ants. An Amazon 

 column goes back to ft nest that it has already partially 

 ravished, in order to finish its work, but has become rather 

 scattered on the way. The small number of robbers march- 

 ing in front are seized and taken prisoners by the assailing 

 rnfibarbes, which have meanwhile assembled. The Amazons 

 following, seeing this, halt and await the main army. After 

 its arrival the mfibarbes are attacked and flung aside in heaps. 

 The prisoners are freed, and fresh pupaa carried away. 



The rvfibarbes preserve their warlike character even as 

 slaves. If hostile ants approach the nest in which they live 

 as slaves, they gallantly attack them, while the small black 

 slaves (F. fusca) are content to call their masters, and only 

 rarely take part themselves in the fight. On the other hand, 

 they help diligently in the plundering, when their owners 

 have destroyed a hostile nest or a hostile army. Forel saw 

 them pick up and carry back to the nest some of their 

 masters which had lost their way in the heat of battle. 



The most terrible enemy of the Amazons is the sanguine 

 ant (jP. sanguined), which also keeps slaves and thereby often 

 comes into collision with the Amazons on their marauding 

 excursions. It is not equal to it in bodily strength or 

 fighting capacity, but surpasses it in intelligence ; according 

 to Forel it is the most intelligent of all the species of ants. 

 If Forel, for instance, poured out the contents of a sack 

 filled with a nest of the slave species near an Amazon nest, 

 the Amazons apparently generally regarded the tumbled 

 together heap of ants, larvae, pupa3, earth, building materials, 

 etc., as the dome of a hostile nest, and took all imaginable but 

 useless pains to find out the entrances thereinto, leaving on one 

 side for this investigation their only object, the carrying off 

 the pupae : but the sanguine ants under similar circumstances 

 did not allow themselves to be deceived, but at once 

 ransacked the whole heap. On August 3, 1869, Forel set 

 down an apparatus containing an artificial nest of Amazons 

 with small black slaves (F. fusca) quite close to a nest of the 



