ANTS— GENERAL INTELLIGENCE. 
1 35 
the resources of the animal, when determined to carry its point, 
were not exhausted, and by ascending the wall to a certain 
height, with a slight effort against it, in falling it managed to 
land in safety upon the table. 
Colonel Sykes was a good observer, so that this state- 
ment, standing upon his authority, ought not, perhaps, to 
be questioned. But in all cases of remarkable intelligence 
displayed by animals, we naturally and properly desire 
corroboration, however good the authority may be on 
which the statement of such cases may rest. I will, there- 
fore, add the following instances of the ingenious and 
determined manner in which ants overcome obstacles, and 
which so far lend confirmation to the above account. 
Professor Leuckart placed round the trunk of a tree, 
which was visited by ants as a pasture for aphides, a broad 
cloth soaked in tobacco-water. When the ants returning 
home down the trunk of the tree arrived at the soaked 
cloth, they turned round, went up the, tree again to some 
of the overhanging branches, and allowed themselves to 
drop clear of the obnoxious barrier. On the other hand, 
the ants which desired to mount the tree first examined 
the nature of the barrier, then turned back and procured 
from a distance little pellets of earth, which they carried 
in their jaws and deposited one after another upon the 
tobacco-cloth till a road of earth was made across it, over 
which the ants passed to and fro with impunity. 
This interesting, and indeed surprising observation of 
Leuckart’s is, in turn, a corroboration of an almost 
identical one made more than a century ago by Cardinal 
Fleury, and communicated by him to Reaumur, who 
published it in his ‘l’Histoire des Insectes 5 (1734). 
The Cardinal smeared the trunk of a tree with birdlime 
in order to prevent the ants from ascending it ; but the 
insects overcame the obstacle by making a road of earth, 
small stones, &c., as in the case just mentioned. In 
another instance the Cardinal saw a number of ants make 
a bridge across a vessel of water surrounding the bottom 
of an orange-tree tub. They did so by conveying a 
number of little pieces of wood , the choice of which 
material instead of earth or stones, as in the previous case. 
