BLACK SOLDIER-ANTS. 577 



diers passing without touching it. I lifted up the stick and broke 

 a portion of the gallery, and then laid it across the path in the 

 middle of the black regiment. The white ants, when uncovered, 

 scampered about with great celerity, hiding themselves under the 

 leaves, but attracted little attention from the black marauders till 

 one of the leaders caught them, and, applying his sting, laid them 

 in an instant on one side in a state of coma ; the others then 

 promptly seized them and rushed off. On first observing these 

 marauding insects at Kolobeng, I had the idea, imbibed from a 

 work of no less authority than Brougham's Paley, that they seized 

 the white ants in order to make them slaves ; but, having rescued 

 a number of captives, I placed them aside, and found that they 

 never recovered from the state of insensibility into which they had 

 been thrown by the leaders. I supposed then that the insensibil- 

 ity had been caused by the soldiers holding the necks of the white 

 ants too tightly with their mandibles, as that is the way they seize 

 them ; but even the pupse which I took from the soldier-ants, 

 though placed in a favorable temperature, never became developed. 

 In addition to this, if any one examines the orifice by which the 

 black ant enters his barracks, he will always find a little heap of 

 hard heads and legs of white ants, showing that these black ruf- 

 fians are a grade lower than slave-stealers, being actually canni- 

 bals. Elsewhere I have seen a body of them removing their eggs 

 from a place in which they were likely to be flooded by the rains ; 

 I calculated their numbers to be 1260 ; they carried their eggs a 

 certain distance, then laid them down, when others took them and 

 carried them farther on. Every ant in the colony seemed to be 

 employed in this laborious occupation, yet there was not a white 

 slave-ant among them. One cold morning I observed a band of 

 another species of black ant returning each with a captive ; there 

 could be no doubt of their cannibal propensities, for the " brutal 

 soldiery" had already deprived the white ants of their legs. The 

 fluid in the stings of this species is of an intensely acid taste. 



I had often noticed the stupefaction produced by the injection 

 of a fluid from the sting of certain insects before. It is particu- 

 larly observable in a hymenopterous insect called the " jplasterer" 

 (Pelojpcieus EcMoni), which in his habits resembles somewhat the 

 mason-bee. It is about an inch and a quarter in length, jet black 

 in color, and may be observed coming into houses, carrying in 



Oo 



