PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 353 



in mid-air; though somethnes the union takes place on the summit of 

 plants, but rarely in the nests. ^ After this danse de V amour is celebrated, 

 the males disappear, probably dying, or becoming, with many of the 

 females, the prey of birds or fish-; for, since they do not return to the 

 nest, they cannot be destroyed, as some have supposed, like the drone 

 bees, by the neuters. That many, both males and females, become the 

 prey of fish, I am enabled to assert from my own observation. In the 

 beginning of August, 1812, I was going up the Orford river in Suffolk, in 

 a row-boat, in the evening, when my attention was caught by an infinite 

 number of winged ants, both males and females, at which the fish were 

 every where darting, floating alive upon the surface of the water. While 

 passing the river, these had probably been precipitated into it, either by 

 the wind, or by a heavy shower which had just fallen. And M. Huber 

 after the same event observed the earth strewed with females that had 

 lost their wings, all of which could not form colonies.*' 



Captain Haverfield, R. N., gave me an account of an extraordinary 

 appearance of ants observed by him in the Med way, in the autumn of 

 1814, when he was first-lieutenant of the Clorinde, which is confirmed by 

 the following letter addressed by the surgeon of that ship, now Dr. Brom- 

 ley, to Mr. MacLeay : — 



"In September, 1814, being on the deck of the hulk to the Clorinde, 

 my attention was drawn to the water by the first-lieutenant (Haverfield) 

 observing there was something black floating down with the tide. On 

 looking with a glass, I discovered they were insects. The boat was sent, 

 and brought a bucket full of them on board ; — they proved to be a large 

 species of ant, and extended from the upper part of Salt-pan Reach out 

 towards the Great Nore, a distance of five or six miles. The column 

 appeared to be in breadlh eight or ten feet, and in height about six inches, 

 which I suppose must have been from their resting one upon another." 

 Purchas seems to have witnessed a similar phenomenon on shore. " Other 

 sorts (of ants)," says he, " there are many, of which some become winged 

 and fill the air with swarms, which sometimes happens in England, On 

 Bartholomew, 1613, I was in the island of Foulness on our Essex shore, 

 where were such clouds of these flying pismires, tliat we could no where 

 fly from them, but they filled our clothes ; yea the floors of some houses 

 where they fell were in a manner covered with a black carpet of creeping 

 ants ; which they say drown themselves about that time of the year in 

 the sea."'* 



These ants were winged : whence, in the first instance here related, 

 this immense column came was not ascertained. From the numbers here 

 agglomerated, one would think that all the ant-hills of the counties of 

 Kent and Surrey could scarcely have furnished a sufficient number of 

 males and females to form it. 



When Colonel Sir Augustus Frazer, of the Horse Artillery, was survey- 

 ing on the 6th of October, 1813, the scene of the battle of the Pyrenees 

 from the summit of the mountain called Pena de Aya, or Les Quatre 

 Couronnes, he and his friends were enveloped by a swarm of ants, so 

 numerous as entirely to intercept their view, so that they were glad to 

 remove to another station, in order to get rid of them. 



» De Geer, ii. 1104. * Gould, 99. ^ Huber, 105. * Pilgrimage, 1090. 



30* 



