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tainly <io eat vertebrates. I once heard pitiful squeaks in 

 long grass and found they were attacking a baby rodent : 

 needless to say I freed the infant ! One night on Bugalla an 

 enormous army raided my house— luckily they did not attack 

 me in my tent, although one small colunm came through it — 

 and devoured a nestful of young swallows. Bones and all 

 were carried away, and when I got up in the morning I found 

 the nest full of a writhing mass of these brutes ! I know no 

 more horrid sight in nature than a huge caterpillar rolling 

 over and over in agony while it is cut up alive. The Drivers 

 ^^^ll even manage to cut up slugs, in spite of the slime poured 

 out which usually overwhelms some of them. However, a 

 new species of snail like a huge Vitrina, which was not un- 

 common on Damba, used to escape. It shrank as far as 

 possible within the shell, and produced a mass of bubbles 

 of mucus which so completely surrounded it, shell and all. 

 by a barrier about half an inch thick, that the ants could not 

 get at any part of its body. It was curious to see them biting 

 into the foam and of course finding nothing : and the bubbles 

 were so tenacious that they could not be burst. AVhen an 

 army of Dorylus had been through the jungle hunting, one 

 used to see numbers of these snails which had tried to escape 

 by crawling up tall stems, and then, having come to the top, 

 had surrounded themselves by foam. Indeed, these were 

 the only occasions on which I ever found this mollusc, which 

 probably lives low down among decaying leaves, etc. 



" I very often used to see Dorylus hunting ou Damba fly 

 beach, while I was doing observational fly work there. Be- 

 tween the edge of the forest and the water was a pebbly beach 

 about ten yards wide, and when the ants were hunting, this 

 was thronged with lurking denizens of the dark damp places 

 among dead leaves, etc., which had to flee for their lives from 

 the forest. Cockroaches ran madly about in all directions — 

 if only they kept their heads they might have escaped — but 

 they ran about so wildly that they often tumbled head over 

 heels and thus fell all the easier victims I I twice saw, hover- 

 iug over these cockroaches, and occasionally suddenly pomicing 

 down (apparently for the purpose of ovipositing) several of a 

 small long-bodied insect — it might have been a Dipteron or 



