Still, it seems plain that the habit of keeping slaves has exercised a degrading influence on these ants, and this tendency is much more markedly apparent in several other species. One of these with a really dreadful name, _Strongylognathus_—we might call them Strong Ants, but they seem to be weak ones—is described by Forel as “_une triste caricature_” of the Amazons, and the extraordinary thing is that, though themselves feeble and enervated, they manage to make, or by some means obtain as slaves, the workers of a much more robust species—_Tetramorium_, to wit; workers, by the way, are the only class of ants ever enslaved. These weak ants fight in the same way as the Amazons themselves; but, though spirited enough, they are so much inferior in bodily vigour to the _Tetramoriums_, “a courageous species living in large communities, that in a battle between the two, artificially instigated by Forel, almost all the slave-holders were killed, without being able to avenge their deaths even on a single one of those whom they aspired to rule.” Yet they won the day, or rather the already enslaved _Tetramoriums_, who marched to do battle for them, won it for the few survivors in their ranks. From this we can see how, when these decadents once have slaves, they may get more. The difficulty is how they are obtained in the first instance—when a nest is first founded by a queen of the slave-making species, for example. It might be supposed, finding two kinds of ants living together, one weaker and much more helpless than the other, that the former lived a parasitic existence in the nest of the latter, and was not a slave-owner at all; but this theory is disproved by the fact that no males or females of the _Tetramoriums_ are ever to be found, showing that it is not they but the others who are the true founders of the nest.