240 EXPERIMENTS AS TO POWERS. 
them down on the top of the slope, whence they 
rolled to the bottom, where another relay of labourers 
picked them up and carried them to the new burrow. 
It was amusing to watch the ants hurrying out with 
bundles of food, dropping them over the slope, and 
rushing back immediately for more.’ 
With reference to these interesting statements, I 
tried the following experiment :— 
October 15 (see Fig. 10).—At a distance of 10 
inches from the door of a nest of Lasius niger I fixed 
Fig. 10. an upright ash wand 3 feet 6 inches 
high (a), and from the top of it 
4 I suspended a second, rather shorter 
wand (b). To the lower end of this 
d@ second wand, which hung just over the 
¢ entrance to the nest (c), I fastened 
a flat glass cell (d) in which I placed a number of larve, 
and to them I put three or four specimens of L. niger. 
The drop from the glass cell to the upper part of the 
frame was only 34 an inch; still, though the ants 
reached over and showed a great anxiety to take this 
short cut home, they none of them faced the leap, but 
all went round by the sticks, a distance of nearly 7 
feet. At 6 p.m. there were over 550 larve in the glass 
cell, and I reduced its distance from the upper surface 
of the nest to about 2 of an inch, so that the ants 
could even touch the glass with their antenne, but 
could not reach up nor step down. Still, though the 
drop was so small, they all went round. At J1 p.m. the 
