tropical countries, for he says,[1] "Certainly the Indian ant is also a wise creature. . . . They leave one opening at the top (of the nest), by which they have their exits and entrances, when they come bearing the seeds which they collect." I have never myself found seeds bored through the centre in the way recorded above, but it is possible that different species of ants may treat the seeds in other ways than those observed by me; or, on the other hand, Ælian may have mistaken the gnawing off the radicle of the seed, a process which I shall describe from personal observation below, and imagined that the seed itself was pierced.
Aldrovandus, writing in the sixteenth century, speaks[2] of the ants as storing seed and of their gnawing, "illud principium seu acumen grani, è quo germen emitti à tritico solet"—that is to say, the radicle. But it is not clear whether Aldrovandus treats of what he has himself seen or refers to the account given by a certain Bishop, Simon Mariolus, who, he says "in his most pleasant and learned work, introduces a philosopher as taking his walks abroad and examining an ant's nest with its seed store," &c.
The lively fable of the ant and the grasshopper, as related by La Fontaine, has done much towards familiarizing and keeping alive in the minds of many of us the idea that ants habitually provide stores against the winter; but we must not infer from this narration that the witty French author had ever cared to examine for himself whether the fable, which he borrowed from Æsop, had its foundation in fact or not. The
