Ch. V.] METHOD OF ERADICATING AXTS. 77 



Instead of descending this with their burdens, they cast 

 them down on the top of the slope, whence they rolled 

 down to the bottom, where another relay of labourers 

 picked them up and carried them to the new burrow. It 

 was amusing to watch the ants hurrying out with bundles 

 of food, dropping them over the slope, and rushing back 

 immediately for more. They also brought out great 

 numbers of dead ants that the fumes of the carbolic acid 

 had killed. A few clays afterwards, when I visited the 

 locality again, I found both the old burrows and the new 

 one entirely deserted, and I thought they had died off ; 

 but subsequent events convinced me that the survivors 

 had only moved away to a greater distance. It was fully 

 twelve months before my garden was again invaded. I 

 had then a number of rose-trees and also cabbages grow- 

 ing, which the ants seemed to prefer to everything 

 else. The rose-trees were soon defoliated, and great 

 havoc was made amongst the cabbages. I followed 

 them to their nest, and found it about two hundred yards 

 from the one of the year before. I poured down the 

 burrows, as before, several buckets of water with carbolic 

 acid. The water is required to carry the acid down to 

 the lowest chambers. The ants, as before, were at once 

 withdrawn from my garden ; and two days afterwards, on 

 visiting the place, I found all the survivors at work on one- 

 track that led directly to the old nest of the year before, 

 where they were busily employed making fresh excava- 

 tions. Many were bringing along pieces of the ant- 

 food from the old to the new nests ; others carried the 

 undeveloped white pupaa and larvae. It was a wholesale 

 and entire migration ; and the next day the formicarium 

 down which I had last poured the carbolic acid was 



