102 NATURAL HISTORY READER, 



all as busy as possible, and yet they all have their common 

 plan. The queen lays her eggs ; the workers take care of 

 them, and keep running with them from place to place, 

 always with some object. Almost all ants have several 

 stories or sets of cells for their houses in this way. 



3. Then they watch the state of the weather very care- 

 fully. If the sun is warm, and it will do the eggs good to 

 lie in the upper galleries, every little ant begins tugging 

 them along to put them in a warm place. Then if it grows 

 very hot indeed, so as to make the upper galleries too sul- 

 try, the eggs are carried down into the next row, where it 

 is cooler. Then if a sudden rain comes, making these mid- 

 dle galleries too damp, up run the little busy workers, and 

 carry all the e°'S's to safe chambers far underground. We 



J DO o 



sometimes think that a single baby makes a great deal of 

 work in a house. But suppose that in every house there 

 were a thousand babies, and that every baby had a nurse, 

 and that all these nurses were running to and fro all day 

 with the babies in their arms, carrying them from room to 

 room, to sun them or air them or dry them, what a scene 

 there would be, and how the nurses and babies would tum- 

 ble over each other, up stairs and down ! And yet that is 

 what goes on all the time in the ants' nurseries. 



4. With almost human intelligence ants also show hu- 

 man passion and pugnacity. Henry Thoreau once saw a 

 battle between two tribes of ants which exhibited all the 

 rage and destructive tendencies usually seen upon battle- 

 fields. He says : " One day when I went out to my wood- 

 pile I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much 

 larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely con- 

 tending with one another. Having once got hold, they 

 never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the 

 chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find 

 that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it 

 was a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted 



