HARVESTING ANTS. 
103 
of Texas, attention was first called to the habits of this 
insect by Mr. Buckley fin I860, 1 and by Dr. Lincecum, 
who sent an account of his observations to Mr. Darwin, 
by whom they were communicated to the Linnaean Society 
in 1861. Five years later a paper was published in the 
Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of 
Philadelphia from the MS. of Dr. Lincecum. Lastly, in 
1877 Mr. MacCook went to Texas expressly to study the 
habits of these insects, and he has recently embodied the 
results of his observations in a book of three hundred 
pages. 2 These observations are for the most part confir- 
matory of those of Lincecum, and for this as well as for 
reasons to be deduced from the work itself, they deserve 
to be accepted as trustworthy, notwithstanding that in some 
cases they are provokingly incomplete. The following is 
an epitome of these observations. 
The ants clear away all the herbage above their nest in 
the form of a perfect circle, or 4 disk,’ 15 or 20 feet in 
diameter, by carefully felling every stalk of grass or weed 
that may be growing thereon. As the nests are placed in 
thickly grown localities, the effect of these bald or shaven 
disks is highly conspicuous and peculiar, exactly resembling 
in miniature the clearings which the settlers make in the 
American backwoods. The disk, however, is not merely 
cleared of herbage, but also carefully levelled, all inequali- 
ties of the surface being reduced by building pellets of 
soil into the hollows to an extent sufficient to make a 
uniformly flat surface. The action of rain and the constant 
motion of multitudes of ants cause this flat surface to 
become hard and smooth. In the centre of the disk is the 
gateway of the nest. This may be either a simple hole 
or a hollow cone. 
From the disk in various directions there radiate ant- 
roads or avenues, which are cleared and smoothed like the 
disk itself, and which course through the thick surround- 
ing grass, branching and narrowing as they go till they 
eventually taper away. These roads are usually three or 
four in number before they begin to branch, but may be 
1 Proc. Phil. Acad. Nat. Sci., xii. p. 445. 
2 Agricultural Ant of Texas (Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia, 1880), 
6 
