REMOVAL OF THE DEAD BY ANTS 95 



up by the first worker that happens to come that way 

 and discovers it, and carried out and thrown away. 

 Probably some chemical change which takes place in 

 the organism on the cessation of life and makes it 

 offensive to the living has given rise to this healthy 

 instinct. The dead ant is not indeed seen as a dead 

 fellow-being, but as so much rubbish, or "matter in 

 the wrong place," and is accordingly removed. We can 

 confidently say that this is not a knowledge of death, 

 from what has been observed of the behaviour of ants 

 on the death of some highly regarded individual in 

 the nest a queen, for instance. On this point I will 

 quote a passage from the Rev. William Gould's Account 

 of English Ants, dated 1747. His small book may 

 be regarded as a classic, at all events by naturalists; 

 albeit the editors of our Dictionary of National Bio- 

 graphy have not thought proper to give him a place 

 in that work, in which so many obscurities, especially 

 of the nineteenth century, have had their little lives 

 recorded. 



It may be remarked in passing that the passage to be 

 quoted is a very good sample of the style of our oldest 

 entomologist, the first man in England to observe the 

 habits of insects. His small volume dates many years 

 before the Natural History of Selborne, and his style, 

 it will be seen, is very different from that of Gilbert 

 White. We know from Lord Avebury's valuable book 

 on the habits of ants that Gould was not mistaken in 

 these remarkable observations. 



