It sometimes happens that an ant has manifestly made a bad selection, and is told on its return that what it has brought home with much pains is no better than rubbish, and is hustled out of the nest, and forced to throw its burden away. In order to try whether these creatures were not fallible like other mortals, I one day took out with me a little packet of grey and white porcelain beads, and scattered these in the path of a harvesting train. They had scarcely lain a minute on the earth before one of the largest workers seized upon a bead, and with some difficulty clipped it with its mandibles and trotted back at a great pace to the nest. I waited for a little while, my attention being divided between the other ants who were vainly endeavouring to remove the beads, and the entrance down which the worker had disappeared, and then left the spot. On my return in an hour's time, I found the ants passing unconcernedly by and over the beads which lay where I had strewn them in apparently undiminished quantities; and I conclude from this that they had found out their mistake, and had wisely returned to their accustomed occupations. I have often amused myself by strewing hemp and canary seed or oats, all of which form heavy burdens for the ants, near their nests; and it is a curious sight to watch the eagerness and determination with which they will drag them away. It is interesting also to note how on the following day the husks of these seeds will appear on the rubbish-heap, or sometimes, after a shower of rain, they will be brought out by the ants with the point of the little root (the radicle or fibril as the case may be) gnawed off (see Figs. A, B, C, Plate VI., p. 35). It frequently happens that on the wild hillside the position of a nest of _Atta barbara_ is indicated by the presence of a number of plants growing on or round the kitchen midden, which are properly weeds of cultivation, and strangers to the cistus- and lavender-covered banks of the garrigue. These have sprung from seeds accidentally dropped by the ants, and which they had obtained from the lemon terraces. Thus when you see little patches of ground from one to three feet long and broad, covered with such plants as fumitory (_Fumaria_), oats (_Avena_), nettles (_Urtica membranacea_), four species of _Veronica_, chickweed (_Alsine media_), goosefoot (_Chenopodium_), _Rumex Bucephalephorus_, wild marigold (_Calendula arvensis_), _Antirrhinum Orontium_, _Linaria simplex_, and _Cardamine hirsuta_, you may confidently expect to find a colony of these ants close at hand. [Illustration: _Plate I._] These plants are sometimes found along the sides of miniature gullies and crevices in the rock, where they have been washed by little runlets of water formed in seasons of heavy rain, and thus these interloping plants are occasionally dispersed and brought into competition with the rightful occupiers of the ground.