I have often watched these little creatures at work upon their “heaps,” and have noted how these are gradually built up of aggregations of single grains of earth or sand, which evidently have been dug out grain by grain from the earth, where the excavation is going on, and are then brought in the Ant’s mouth to the surface, and to the top of the rising earth-heap. They are then dropped over its edge, and the Carrier Ant at once races back into the hole presumably for a fresh burden. This process is a very remarkable one, and the way the Ant brings his grain of earth in his mouth and drops it over the edge of the rising Ant-hill, irresistibly reminds one of a railway navvy who wheels his barrow full of earth and tilts it over the edge of the embankment upon which he is at work. The number of single grains in even a small Ant-heap must be very large, and must amount to many thousands, or perhaps to hundreds of thousands. What, then, must be the untiring energy of a small Ant colony, which can reproduce such a granular heap in less than twenty-four hours? It does not always seem clear what the streams of Ants from the parent nest are so constantly occupied in. They may be, to a certain extent, colonizers, but they certainly do not, with me, raise secondary Ant-hills to any great extent at the end of their runs. They make holes in the ground there, and possibly they may be engaged in their proverbial custom of securing and storing up food for the winter. To the uninstructed eye these holes look very much like Colonial outposts. The activity of these Ants entirely ceases with the advent of autumn, and their Ant-hills in my garden entirely disappear until the following season. As we all know, this instinct of storing up food for winter use has been largely denied, but from Sir John Lubbock’s account it certainly exists in some species, though its extent varies greatly. As he says that many of the Ants live through the winter, some food would seem to be required. Speaking of Ants generically, we all doubtless accept King Solomon’s authority upon this point, and we shall not forget that the Roman poet, Virgil, writing just before the Christian era, expressed himself to the same effect. “Ac veluti ingentem formicæ farris acervum Cum populant, hyemis memores, tectoque reponunt.” Whilst Cicero says: “In formica non modo sensus, sed etiam mens, ratio, memoria.”