502 BIjAGK SOLDIER- ANTS. 



distinguished from the rest by their greater size, especi- 

 ally in the region of the sting, then seize the white ants 

 one by one, and inflict a sting, which seems to inject a 

 portion of fluid similar in effect to chloroform, as it 

 renders them insensible, but not dead, and only able to 

 move one or two front legs. As the leaders toss them 

 on one side, the rank and file seize them and carry 

 them off. 



One morning I saw a party going forth on what has 

 been supposed to be a slave-hunting expedition. They 

 came to a stick, which, being enclosed in a white ant 

 gallery, I knew contained numbers of this insect ; but I 

 was surprised to see the black soldiers 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 insensibility 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 pupae which I took from the 

 soldier ants, though placed in a favourable 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 the white ants, showing that these black 

 ruffians are a grade lower than slave-stealers, being 

 actually cannibals. Elsewhere, I have seen a body of 

 them removing their eggs from a r>lace 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 further on. Every ant in the colony 



