FORMICID^ — ANTS. 165 



town was strewed with Ants, so that it was impossible to 

 walk without crushing thirty or forty at every step. And 

 more recently, Mr. Dorthes, in the Journal de Phyi^ique for 

 1*790, relates the appearance of a similar phenomenon at 

 Montpellier. The shoals moved about in different direc- 

 tions, having a singular intestine motion in each column, 

 and also a general motion of rotation. About sunset all 

 fell to the ground, and, on examining them, they were found 

 to belong to the Formica nigra of Linnaeus.^ 



"In September, 1814," says Dr. Bromley, surgeon of 

 the Clorinde, in a letter to Mr. MacLeay, "being on the deck 

 of the hulk to the Clorinde (then in the river Medway), my 

 attention was drawn to the water by the first lieutenant ob- 

 serving there was something black floating down the tide. 

 On looking with a glass, I discovered they were insects. 

 The boat was sent, and brought a bucketful of them on 

 board; they proved to be a large species of Ant, and ex- 

 tended from the upper part of Salt-pan Reach out toward 

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

 appeared to be in breadth 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 wit- 

 nessed 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 hap- 

 pens in England. On Bartholomew, 1613, I was in the 

 island of Foulness, on our Essex shore, where were such 

 clouds of these flying pismires, that we could nowhere flee 

 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."^ 



When Colonel Sir Augustus Frazer, of the British horse- 

 artillery, was surveying, 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 Quartres Couronnes, 

 he and his friends were enveloped by a swarm of Ants, so nu- 

 merous as entirely to intercept their view, so that they were 



1 Penny EncycL, sub. Ant. 



2 K. and S. Introd., ii. 54. 



3 Pilgrimage, p. 1090. 



15* 



