would do as well during the remainder of our trip, for we intended thenceforth to halt as little, and march as steadily, as the country, the weather, and the condition of our means of transportation permitted.  I kept continually wishing that they had more time in which to study the absorbingly interesting life-histories of the beautiful and wonderful beasts and birds we were all the time seeing.  Every first-rate museum must still employ competent collectors; but I think that a museum could now confer most lasting benefit, and could do work of most permanent good, by sending out into the immense wildernesses, where wild nature is at her best, trained observers with the gift of recording what they have observed.  Such men should be collectors, for collecting is still necessary; but they should also, and indeed primarily, be able themselves to see, and to set vividly before the eyes of others, the full life-histories of the creatures that dwell in the waste spaces of the world.

At this point both Cherrie and Miller collected a number of mammals and birds which they had not previously obtained; whether any were new to science could only be determined after the specimens reached the American Museum.  While making the round of his small mammal traps one morning, Miller encountered an army of the formidable foraging ants.  The species was a large black one, moving with a well-extended front.  These ants, sometimes called army-ants, like the driver-ants of Africa, move in big bodies and destroy or make prey of every living thing that is unable or unwilling to get out of their path in time.  They run fast, and everything runs away from their advance.  Insects form their chief prey; and the most dangerous and aggressive lower-life creatures make astonishingly little resistance to them.  Miller’s attention was first attracted to this army of ants by noticing a big centipede, nine or ten inches long, trying to flee before them.  A number of ants were biting it, and it writhed at each bite, but did not try to use its long curved jaws against its assailants.  On other occasions he saw big scorpions and big hairy spiders trying to escape in the same way, and showing the same helpless inability to injure their ravenous foes, or to defend themselves.  The ants climb trees to a great height, much higher than most birds’ nests, and at once kill and tear to pieces any fledglings in the nests they reach.  But they are not as common as some writers seem to imagine; days may elapse before their armies are encountered, and doubtless most nests are never visited or threatened by them.  In some instances it seems likely that the birds save themselves and their young in other ways.  Some nests are inaccessible.  From others it is probable that the parents remove the young.  Miller once, in Guiana, had been watching for some days a nest of ant-wrens which contained young.  Going thither one morning, he found the tree, and the nest itself, swarming with foraging