43 ° 
Habits and Anatomy of the 
[July* 
II. HABITS AND ANATOMY OF THE HONEY- 
BEARING ANT. 
By Charles Morris. 
t N the February number of the “Journal of Science ” 
were published certain results of Dr. McCook’s inves- 
tigations on the habits of the honey-bearing ants. 
Since the period in which these observations were made he 
has had under his constant supervision an artificial formicary 
of these ants, and has made some further interesting com- 
munications in regard to them, of which the following is a 
condensed sketch. 
The most striking points of these communications relate 
to two particulars, one bearing on the sympathy, or spirit of 
beneficence, in the ants ; the other relating to their anatomy. 
The first of these particulars is in the same line of research 
as that followed by Sir John Lubbock, in his observations on 
the behaviour of ants towards captive friends and enemies, 
in which he discovered that, while the ants were full of 
hostility against individual foes, they showed no evidence of 
sympathy for friends in trouble. 
Dr. McCook’s observations lead to the same result. In 
making his artificial formicaries he simply pressed a quantity 
of earth compatfdy into a glass bottle, placed his captured 
colony upon the surface of this earth, and left them to esta- 
blish their new home in their own way. It was not long 
before the workers we re busily engaged in the business of 
excavating ; galleries were speedily formed in the earth, and 
the mined-out materials deposited upon the surface. But 
in this adtive labour the comfort of the poor honey-bearers 
was utterly ignored. They lay helplessly where they had 
been dropped, and were treated by the other ants as if they 
had been so many lifeless impediments to their work. For, 
instead of making a detour around them, the workers went 
straight forward, clambering over any of these helpless 
magazines of sweets that lay in their path, and even 
dropping the pellets of earth which they brought out from 
the excavations upon and around them, until some of the 
honey-bearers were almost buried by their own heedless 
friends. 
There seemed here, indeed, a double lack — a lack both of 
