54' PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 



pismires, that 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 ascer- 

 tained. 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 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 Quatre Cou- 

 ronnes, 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 or- 

 der to get rid of them. 



The females that escape from the injury of the ele- 

 ments and their various enemies, become the founders 

 of new colonies, doing all tlie work, as I have related 

 in a former letter, that is usually done by the neuters''. 

 M. P. Huber has found incipient colonies, in which were 

 only a few workers engaged with their mother in the care 

 of a small number of larvae; and M. Perrot, his friend, 

 once discovered a small nest, occupied by a solitary fe- 

 male, who was attending upon four pupae only. Such is 



» Pifgrimage, 1090. 



>' M. Huber observes that fecundated females, after they have lost 

 their wings, make themselves a subterranean cell, some singly, others 

 in common. From wliich it appears that some colonies have more than 

 one female, from their first establishment. 



