Chapters in modern botany / by Patrick Geddes.

  • Patrick Geddes
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Chapters in modern botany / by Patrick Geddes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    151/230 (page 129)
    These ants seem at first sight to lead the happiest of existences. Protected by their stings, they fear no foe. Habitations full of food are provided for them to commence housekeeping with, and cups of nectar and luscious fruits await them every day. But there is a reverse to the picture. In the dry season on the plains the acacias cease to grow. No young leaves are produced, and the old glands do not secrete honey. Then want and hunger overtake the ants that have revelled in luxury all the wet season; many of the thorns are depopulated, and only a .few ants live through the season of scarcity. As soon, however, as the first rains set in, the trees throw out numerous vigorous shoots, and the ants multiply again with astonishing rapidity. A more recent traveller. Professor A. F. W. Schimper, who has reinvestigated the whole matter, has gathered some new facts of much interest, and the student may be referred to Schimper's book ^ not only on its own account, but for the bibliography of the subject which it contains. He tells us first of the destructive ravages of the leaf- cutting ants, the sight of whose march soon becomes familiar to the traveller in tropical America. In a minute or two a sixpence-like circle is cut from a leaf and the ant marches off with its burden. Only the dry and the very young leaves are spared, and armies of thousands of ants soon make sad havoc of a tree's foliage. There has been considerable diversity of opinion as to the uses to which the ants put the leaves which they carry home. Bates supposed that they were used as a lining for the subterranean galleries, whilst M'Cook obseirved, in the case of Atta fe}-vens and A. septenirionalis, that a papery material was manufactured from the leaves and used in the internal furnishing of the 1 Die Wechsclbezielnijigeii zwisrJien Pflanzen und Ameisen in tropischen Amerika, 8vo. Jena, 1888. Cp. E. Huth. MyrmccophiU und Myrmecophobe Pflanzen. Berlin, 1887. K