These foraging ants show a good deal of sympathy with one another, and if one is in distress the others will do their best to relieve him from his embarrassment. Mr. Belt, a naturalist who spent some time in Nicaragua, made some experiments with a view to testing these points. He took an ant, and placed it under a stone in the line of the marching column. The first of the marching ants that saw its plight hurried back, and soon returned with several companions, to whom it had evidently communicated the intelligence. Some seized and tugged the ant, whilst others bit and pushed the stone, and, between them, the prisoner was soon freed. Other ants Mr. Belt covered up with clay, leaving only their head or antennæ projecting, and all were rescued in the same way. Lord Avebury has tried similar experiments with our own English ants, but the results were not so satisfactory. Both in sympathy and intelligence, these foraging ants of America seem much superior to the various European species. More experiments, however, with a greater number of species are much to be desired. Another ant of tropical America is the famous _sauba_ or leaf-cutting ant. All day long these insects seem occupied in cutting out pieces of leaves, and carrying them off to their nests. New arrivals in the country are astonished to meet long columns of them marching down well-beaten paths, and all carrying circular pieces of green leaf, the size of a sixpence, held upright in their jaws. All these are marching homewards, but beside them, empty-handed, another stream goes hurrying back to the forest, from which their comrades are returning laden. What use do the ants make of these leaves, after they have carried them down into their nests? In regard to this there have been various opinions. Some naturalists used to think that they used them as food simply, others that they made a sort of underground roof to their nests with them; but Mr. Belt has almost proved that what the ants really do with their leaves, is to make them into mushroom-beds, the mushrooms—not the leaves themselves—being used as food by the community. He found, on excavating their nests, that they consisted of a number of chambers, as large, and almost as round, as a man’s head. In each of these lay a brown mass of vegetable matter, which, on examination, proved to be made of the leaves themselves, now withered and cut into a number of small pieces, amidst which, and holding them all together, grew a minute white fungus—the mushrooms of the ants. Mr. Belt proved that it was not the leaves themselves which the ants ate, because he found deserted chambers filled with these, which, now that their manuring properties had become exhausted, no longer supported any fungus. Yet that the ants require food in their nests must be assumed, since they are never seen feeding outside them; and, moreover, when they desert the nest and establish themselves in another, they take the fungus-bearing leaves, but not the others, with