ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE, 
42 
of their community after so prolonged an absence. Think*' 
ing that the facts could only be explained, either by all 
the ants in the same nest having a peculiar smell, or by 
all the members of the same community having a par- 
ticular pass-word or gesture-sign, Sir John Lubbock, 
with the view of testing this theory, separated some ants 
from a nest while still in the condition of pupae, and, 
when they emerged from that state as perfect insects, 
transferred them back to the nest from which they had 
been taken as pupae. Of course in this case the ants in 
the nest could never have seen those which had been 
removed, for a larval ant is as unlike the mature insect as 
a grub is unlike a beetle ; neither can it be supposed that 
a larva, hatched out away from the nest, should retain, 
when a perfect insect, any smell belonging to its parent 
nest — more especially as it had been hatched out by 
ants in another nest ; 1 nor, lastly, is it reasonable to 
imagine t hat the animal, while still a larval grub, can have 
been taught any gesture-signal used as a pass-word by the 
matured animals. Yet, although all these possible hypo- 
theses seem to be thus fully excluded by the conditions 
of the experiment, the result showed unequivocally that 
the ants recognised their transformed larvae as native-born 
members of their community. 
Lastly, Sir John Lubbock tried the experiment of 
going still further back in the life-history of the ants 
before separating them from the nest. For in September 
he divided a nest into two halves, each having a' queen. 
At this season there were neither larvae nor eggs. The 
following April both the queens began to lay eggs, and in 
August — i.e. nearly a year after the original partitioning 
of the nest — he took some of the ants newly hatched from 
the pupae in one division, and placed them in the other 
division, and vice versa. In all cases these ants were re- 
ceived by the members of the other half of the divided 
nest as friends, although if a stranger were introduced into 
either half it was invariably killed. Yet the ants which 
1 It is to be noted that although ants will attack stranger ants 
introduced from other nests, they will careful’y tend stranger larvaa 
similarly introduced. 
