A MONOGRAPH OF THE HABITS, ARCHITECTURE, AND BY HENRY CHRISTOPHER MCCOOK. @ PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. ΤΟ MY FRIENDS AND PARISHIONERS OF THE TABERNACLE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, OF PHILADELPHIA, WHOSE KINDNESS TO THEIR PASTOR ALLOWS THE ANNUAL SUMMER VACATIONS WHICH HAVE MADE POSSIBLE THE PROSECUTION AND PUBLICATION OF THE FOLLOWING AND OTHER NATURE-STUDIES, PREFACE. THE best key to the habits of the whole family of ants is a complete life-history of one representative individual. The Agricultural Ant perhaps more thoroughly represents the FORMICARIÆ than any other species. Its admirable social organization; its skill as a mason in excavating its vast and well-ordered system of underground chambers; its extensive surface operations in clearing out circular court-yards to its nests, and roadways to its foraging grounds; the striking variations in its surface architecture from cones to flat disks; its highly-developed stinging powers, which place it among the most formidable of the aculeate species; and (not to mention other characteristics) that special harvesting habit to which it owes its name, and which has attracted to it an especial interest,—all these combine to make the Agricultural Ant of Texas one of the very best representatives of the emmet family in all its most striking instincts. This fact will, it is hoped, justify the bestowment of so much attention upon one ant. From one the reader may learn all. There are, of course, differences, and wide ones, in special habits, between the agricultural and other ants. But it will certainly be found that the life-history here given will afford a clue by which the habits of most species may be successfully traced and uncovered. The studies in anatomy, so far as they go, will also serve, in the same way, to point out the chief characteristics in |