PSYCHE 
VOL. XXXIX SEPTEMBER, 1932 
No. 3 
AN AUSTRALIAN LEPTANILLA 
By William Morton Wheeler 
Harvard University 
The very interesting Formicid subfamily Leptanillinse 
comprises only two genera of minute, yellow, blind and 
hypogseic ants, namely, Leptanilla, established by Emery 
as long ago as 1870 and Phaulomyrma, established by G. C. 
and E. W. Wheeler in 1930 on a male specimen from 
Java. This genus probably also includes Santschi’s L. tanit 
from Tunis. Of the eleven described species of Leptanilla, 
four are known only from males; of the remaining seven, 
five are known only from workers and only two from both 
workers and females. The geographical distribution of the 
various species is peculiar. Six of them, namely, L. theryi 
Forel, vaucheri Emery, exigua Santschi, minuscula Sants- 
chi, nana Santschi and tenuis Santschi, were taken in 
North Africa (Algiers, Tunis, Morocco), two, doderoi Em- 
ery and revelierei Emery, in Corsica and Sardinia (though 
the subspecies chobauti Emery of revelierei occurs in Mo- 
rocco), two, havilandi Forel and butteli Forel, in the Malay 
Peninsula and one, sants chii G. C. and E. W. Wheeler, in 
Java. 
During November, 1931, while I was with the Harvard 
Zoological Expedition in Australia, Mr. D. C. Swan of the 
Waite Institute at Glen Osmond, S. A., generously gave me 
some minute ants which he discovered in Western Austra- 
