54 PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 
chas seems to have witnessed a similar phenomenon on 
shore. ‘ Other sorts (of ants),” says he, “ there are | 
many, of which some become winged and fill the air with 
swarms, which sometimes happens in England. On Bar- 
tholomew 1613 I was in the island of Foulness on our 
Essex shore, where were such clouds of these flying pis- 
mires, that we could no where fly from them, but they 
filled our clothes, yea the floors of some houses where 
they fell were in a manner covered with a black carpet 
of creeping ants; which they say drown themselves about 
that time of the year in the sea?. 
These ants were winged—whence, in the first instance 
here related, this immense column came was not ascer- 
tained. From the numbers here agglomerated, one would 
think that all the ant-hills of the counties of Kent and 
Surrey could scarcely have furnished a sufficient number 
of males and females to form it. 
When Colonel Sir Augustus Frazer, of the Horse 
Artillery, was surveying on the 6th of October 1813 the 
scene of the battle of the Pyrenees from the summit of 
the mountain called Pena de Aya, or Les Quatre Cou- 
ronnes, he and his friends were enveloped by a swarm of 
ants, so numerous as entirely to intercept their view, so 
that they were glad to remove to another station, in order 
to get rid of them. 
The females that escape from the injury of the elements 
and their various enemies, become the founders of new 
colonies, doing all the work, as I have related ina for- 
mer letter, that is usually done by the neuters’. M. P. 
2 Pilgrimage, 1090. 
" M. Huber observes that fecundated females, after they have lost 
