ANTS— WARS. 
77 
other out of their nests in a quite friendly way. Forel laid on 
a table a piece of bark with a nest of the gentle Leptothorax 
acervorum , and then put on it the contents of another nest of 
the same species. The last comers were by far the more nume- 
rous, and soon possessed themselves of the nest, driving out the 
inmates, lint the latter did not know whither to go, and 
turned back again. They were then seized by their opponents 
one after the other, carried away as far as possible from the nest, 
and there put down. The oftener they came back the further 
were they carried away. One of the carriers arrived in this 
fashion at the edge of the table, and after it had by means of its 
feelers convinced itself that it had reached the end of the world, 
mercilessly let its burden drop into the fathomless abyss. It 
waited a moment to see if it had attained its object, and then 
turned back to the nest. Forel picked up the ant which had 
fallen on the floor, and put it down right in front of the return- 
ing ant. The latter repeated the same manoeuvre as at first, 
only stretching its neck further over the edge of the table He 
several times reiterated his experiment, and always with the 
same result. Later the two colonies were shut up together in 
a glass case, and gradually learned to agree. 
At other times, however, warlike ants show great and 
needless cruelty to one another : — 
They slowly pull from their victim, that is rendered defence- 
less by wounds, exhaustion, or terror, first one feeler and then 
the other, then the legs one after another, until they at last 
kill it, or pull it in a completely mutilated and helpless con- 
dition to some out-of-the-way spot where it perishes miserably. 
Yet some compassionate hearts are to be found among the 
victors, which only pull the conquered to a distant place in order 
to get rid of them, and there let them go without injuring 
them. 
The following account is also taken from Biichner’s 
‘Mind in Animals,’ p. 87 
The doors are often guarded by special sentries, which fulfil 
their important duty in various ways. Forel saw a nest of the 
Golobopsis truncata , the two or three very small round open- 
ings of which were watched by soldiers, arranged so that 
their thick cylindrical heads stopped them up, just as a cork 
stops up the mouth of a bottle. The same observer saw the 
Myrmecina Latreillei defend themselves against the invasions 
of the slave-making Strong ylognathus, by placing a worker at 
each of the little openings of the nest, which quite stops up 
