For my part, I think that this is very likely to have been the case in some instances, for until lately it has not been the custom to watch insects, or indeed any animals, minutely, and it is not the business—and often not the interest—of poets to verify matters of this kind. In the Mishna, however, which is a collection of old Jewish writings, we find a law relating to this grain stored up by the ants, and the ownership of it; and anyone who had read this might have known that the thing was a reality, since minute regulations about the possession of something can hardly exist, unless that something exists, too. This is the law, which, as will be seen, dealt fairly by everyone except by the ants—“The little caves of ants, when in the midst of a standing crop, are adjudged to the owner of the field; of those behind the reapers, the upper part is the property of the poor, the lower of the proprietor.” Rabbi Meir, however, decided that “all belong to the poor, since whatever is in doubt, in gleaning, goes to the gleaner.” Yet in spite of the strong presumption in favour of ant providence and foresight, which this piece of ancient legislation raises, opinion was against it, and it was not till 1829 that the question was set at rest by Lieutenant-Colonel Sykes, who, whilst at Poonah, in India, saw and examined these “little caves of the ants” and also the ants carrying the seeds, not into but out of them. “Each ant,” he tells us, “was charged with a single seed; but, as it was too weighty for many of them, and as the strongest had some difficulty in scaling the perpendicular sides of the cylindrical hole leading to the nest below, many were the falls of the weaker ants with their burdens, from near the summit to the bottom.” The ants, however, that thus fell never relaxed their hold of the grain they were carrying, and, with a perseverance affording a useful lesson to humanity, “steadily recommenced the ascent, after each successive tumble, nor halted in their labour until they had crowned the summit and lodged their burden on the common heap.” This observation was made just after the heavy rains of the Indian monsoon. The seeds had probably got wet, and the ants were bringing them up to dry in the sun.