Notes on Indian Ants. 
205 
headed soldier of compressus. Perhaps they act as 
undertakers, and collect the dead thrown out by Cam- 
fonotiis for some special purpose of their own ; and, then, 
why should this trait break out in Madura, for certainly 
I have not met with it in other parts, although com- 
pressits and rhomhinoda are practically common every- 
where. 
These are the only two interesting forms of nest of 
Pheidole I have come across, but I have never had the 
good fortune to find P. syl^esii and P. wroughtonii, 
the clever embankment builders which Mr. Wroughton 
so affectionately describes, nor have I found Pheidole 
in my travels a really strong harvester as Holcomyrmex 
everywhere is, as M. salomonis is in a lesser degree, 
and as Solenopsis undoubtedly is on the Western side 
of India, and but for the exhaustive observations Mr. 
Wroughton has made on this, his favourite genus, I 
should certainly have held Pheidole' s harvesting powers 
in but poor repute instead of respecting her as the 
harvester par excellence of at least many parts of India. 
Or emastog aster rogenhoferi, Mayr. 
I found a very fine nest in the compound of a 
bungalow at Bandora, near Bombay, and spent a long 
Sunday afternoon in trying to coax, worry and force 
the ants to stridulate, or make a sound of some kind or 
other. On disturbing the big brown-paper nest by 
tapping it with a stick the ants would swarm out in 
thousands, and a sound of some sort followed, but it did 
not suggest to me quite the hissing of a red-hot cinder 
plunged into water, as described by Mr. Wroughton in 
Our Ants,^' but rather the pattering sound of many feet 
on the hollow nest, exactly as is met with when a nest 
of (Ecophylla smaragdina is treated in the same way. 
With more violent tapping and shaking, the a,nts 
began to fall in showers on to a fence and some shrubs 
beneath which produced the sound-effect of falling rain. 
A large piece of the centre of the nest was then broken 
out, and the ants fell in numbers from the upper to the 
lower half, and this produced very excellent rain, more 
like the pattering of the early drops of a thunder shower 
(English, not Tropical), and this went on long after I 
had ceased to worry the nest. On the ground and on 
the fence beneath the nest the ants collected in 
