126 Chapter III. 



cries of her child the mother ran to the spot and killed 

 a few score of ants. A short time after she saw the 

 corpses surrounded by a number of their companions. 

 The burial ceremonies began. A deputation of ants 

 was despatched to the nest to fetch the train of 

 mourners. They marched in due order two by two to 

 the scene of disaster. They took up the corpses, 

 marched slowly in procession to a sandy place in the 

 neighborhood and buried them one by one. A few of 

 the gravediggers which tried to escape this doleful 

 duty by flight, were pursued by the other ants, over- 

 taken and summarily sentenced to death. The sen- 

 tence was immediately carried out, and the criminals 

 were all interred in a common pit. The said lady 

 maintains to have witnessed similar proceedings more 

 than once. Gerstaecker in his ''Report on the scientific 

 results obtained by Entomology during the year 1861" 

 mentions this burial story (p. 156) with the follow- 

 ing ironical remark: "To render the mystification 

 complete, nothing more was lacking than a funeral 

 sermon held by one of the ants." Strange to say, 

 Perty* attempts to defend the imaginative lady against 

 Gerstaecker by saying: "Thqre seems to be some 

 truth in it, anyway, for Dupont also maintains that 

 ants have common graveyards at some distance from 

 their buildings, whither they carry their dead." 

 Ernest Andre^ was far more correct about those burial 

 ceremonies of ants in calling them phantastic misrep- 

 resentations of the commonest occurrences. It seems 

 scarcely possible, that such an anecdote should see 



1) "Seelenleben der Thiere" (2d ed.), p. 328. 



2) "Les fourmis" (Paris, 1885), p. 176. 



