PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 49 
arrangement and descriptions of the species, but as con- 
centrating the accounts of preceding authors, and add- 
ing several interesting facts ex proprio penu. ‘The great 
historiographer of ants, however, is M. P. Huber; who 
has lately published a most admirable and interesting 
work upon them, in which he has far outstripped all his 
predecessors.—Such are the sources from which the fol- 
lowing account of ants is principally drawn, intermixed 
with which you will find some occasional observations, — 
the care of their progeny. He knew also, that when there was more 
than one queen in a nest, the rivals lived in perfect harmony. 
With respect to the neuters, he had witnessed the homage they 
pay their queens or fertile females, continued even after their death ; 
—this homage, he however observes, which is noticed by no other 
author, appears often to be temporary and local—ceasing at certain 
times, and being renewed upon a change of residence. He enlarges 
upon their exemplary care of the eggs, larve, and pupe. He tells us 
that the eggs, as soon as laid, are taken by the neuters and deposited 
in heaps, and that the neuters brood them. He particularly notices 
their carrying them, with the larvae and pupa, daily from the interior 
to the surface of the nest and back again, according to the tempera- 
ture; and that they feed the larvee by disgorging the food from their 
own stomach. He speaks also of their opening the cocoons when the 
pup are ready to assume the imago, and disengaging them from 
them. With regard to their labours, he found that they work ail 
night, except during violent rains :—that their instinct varies as to 
the station of their nest:—that their masonry is consolidated by no 
cement, but consists merely of mould ;—that they form roads and 
trackways to and from their nests ;—that they carry each other in 
sport, and sometimes lie heaped one on another in the sun.—He sus- 
pects that they occasionally emigrate ;—he proves by a variety of ex~ 
periments that they do not hoard up provisions. He found they were 
often infested by a particular kind of Gordius :—he had noticed also 
that the neuters of I”. rufa and flava (which escaped M. Huber, 
though he observed it in F. rufescens, Latr.) are of two sizes, which 
the writer of this note can confirm by producing specimens :—and 
lastly, with Swammerdam, he had recourse to artificial colonies, the 
better to enable him to examine their proceedings, but not compara- 
ble to the ingenious apparatus of M. Huber. 
VOL, II. E 
