70 EGGS OF APHIDES KEPT THROUGH 
perhaps a little sooner. The female eggs are covered 
with a thin black membrane, are oblong, and about 
the sixteenth or seventeenth part of an inch in length. 
The male eggs are of a more brown complexion, and 
usually laid in March.’ 
These dark eggs are not those of ants, but of 
aphides. The error is very pardonable, because the 
ants treat these eggs exactly as if they were their own, 
guarding and tending them with the utmost care. I 
first met with them in February 1876, and was much 
astonished, not being at that time aware of Huber’s 
observations. I found, as Huber had done before me, 
that the ants took great care of these brown bodies, 
carrying them off to the lower chambers with the 
utmost haste when the nest was disturbed. I brought 
some home with me and put them near one of my 
own nests, when the ants carried them inside. That 
year I was unable to carry my observations further. 
In 1877 I again procured some of the same eggs, and 
offered them to my ants, who carried them into the 
nest, and in the course of March I had the satisfaction 
of seeing them hatch into young aphides. M. Huber, 
however, did not think that these were ordinary eggs. 
On the contrary, he agreed with Bonnet, ‘that the 
insect, in a state nearly perfect, quits the body of its 
mother in that covering which shelters it from the cold 
in winter, and that it is not, as other germs are, in the 
egg surrounded by food by means of which it is de- 
veloped and supported. It is nothing more than an 
