460 INSECTS. 



ceed to pluuder the nest of all the eggs and larves which they can 

 carry off. They return laden with this booty to their own habi- 

 tations, and consign it to the care of the ash-coloured ants be- 

 longing to their community, who are waiting in eager expectation 

 to receive them. These eggs and larves are watched, nourished, 

 and reared to maturity, with the same care and assiduity which 

 the auxiliaries bestow on their own progeny ; and thus they be- 

 come, in process of time, inmates in the same society with those 

 who had originally kidnapped them; and towards whom, had they 

 been brought up at home, they would have cherished an instinctive 

 and inveterate hatred. The sole object of the amazons in these 

 expeditions, is to procure this supply of recruits for the advantage 

 of the community to which they belong ; and the sole business of 

 their lives is to carry on these marauding adventures. They do 

 not assist in any of the ordinary labours of the community. The 

 tasks of building and repairing their city, of providing nourishment 

 for the whole society, of rearing the brood of young, both of their 

 own species and that of their companions, are entrusted solely to the 

 race of auxiliaries, to whose services they have become entitled by 

 the right of conquest. In times of peace the amazons are totally 

 inactive, and dependent on the labouring classes of the auxiliaries, 

 who feed and carress them, minister to all their wants, and carry 

 them wherever the temperature of the air is most grateful. In a 

 word, they are gentlemen waited on by their domestics, who ap- 

 pear to retain no sense of the injury that has been done them by 

 their masters, but bear towards them the tender affection of chil- 

 dren towards their parents. The more cruel relation of master and 

 of slave seems, indeed, to be entirely excluded from this singular 

 association of insects. In order to have a just idea of the complex 

 system it involes, we must recollect, that each species consists of 

 three kinds of sexes, having perfectly distinct offices to perform : 

 that each insect exists in three different stages of transformation ; 

 and that, in addition to the race of ants, several species of aphis 

 are also inmates under the same roof. In some nests, our author 

 found auxiliary ants of different species from the ash-coloured, 

 being what he called miners (mineuses), but still bearing, in all 

 respects the same relations to the amazons that the ash-coloured 

 did in the former case, and obtained from their parents by the same 

 violent methods. 





