PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 83 
make only five or six in the year. They will sometimes 
travel 150 paces to attack a negro colony. 
After reading this account of expeditions undertaken 
by ants for so extraordinary a purpose, you will be cu- 
rious to know how the slaves are treated in the nests of 
these marauders—whether they live happily, or labour 
under an oppressive yoke. You must recollect that they 
are not carried off, like our negroes, at an age when the 
amor patrie and all the charities of life which bind them 
to their country, kindred and friends, are in their full 
strength, but in what may be called the helpless days of 
infancy, or in their state of repose, before they can have 
formed any associations or imbibed any notions that 
render one place and society more dear to them than 
another. Preconceived ideas, therefore, do not exist to 
influence their happiness, which must altogether depend 
upon the treatment which they experience at the hands 
of their new masters. Here the goodness of Providence 
is conspicuous; which, although it has gifted these crea- 
tures with an instinct so extraordinary, and seemingly so 
unnatural, has not made it a source of misery to the ob- 
jects of it. 
You will here, perhaps, imagine that I have not suf- 
ficiently taken into consideration the anxiety and priva- 
tions undergone by the poor neuters, in beholding those 
foster-children, for which they have all along manifested 
such tender solicitude, thus violently snatched from them: 
but when you reflect that they are the common property 
of the whole colony, and that, consequently, there can 
scarcely be any separate attachment to particular indi- 
viduals, you will admit that, after the fright and horror 
of the conflict are over, and their enemies have retreated, 
G2 
