69 
dew which the bees collect. This kind is blackish, and has 
no horns, like the preceding; but it is marked on that part 
of the skin with a small black pustule, or button, shining 
bright as jet. Biassed by what some naturalists had ad- — 
vanced, and others repeated, I thought that these horns, as 
they asserted, carried at their ends a liquid which the ants 
went thither to suck. But on observing a little closer, I 
found that what attracted the ants was ejected from a dif- 
ferent part, both in the large and small pucerons, and that 
it did not exude from the horns of the latter more than 
from those which the caterpillars have on their tails. 
Some bees afforded me an opportunity to inform myself 
on this point. Their buzzing in the midst of a tuft of 
green oak, induced me to suspect that some pressing in- 
terest had attracted them thither. In fact, although it was 
not the season of honey dew, which I had known, nor the 
place where it was usually found, I saw with surprise, the 
leaves and branches in the middle of the tuft covered with 
it. It was a festival for the bees, who, grumbling, collect- 
ed the honey drops. 
The singular form of these drops attracted my notice, 
and occasioned the small discovery which I now report. In 
lieu of being rounded, like drops which had only fallen, 
these formed, each a little oval, much, elongated. It was 
easy to discover whence they came. The gluey leaves, to 
which the bees attached themselves, were directly under ~ 
some of those groups of the large black pucerons. On ex- 
amining them, I perceived some from time to time, who 
raising their abdomen, showed at the end of it a small tear 
of transparent liquor, of the colour of amber, which they, 
the instant after, threw off some inches distant. I put 
some of these ejections, which I had received on my hand, 
to my mouth, and found they had the same taste as those 
which had already fallen on the leaves. I had occasion to 
see the same manceuvre in the smaller species, or among 
the horned kind. They ejected the drop from the same 
_ part, in the same manner, and in a situation precisely simi- 
lar. 
This ejection, moreover, which alone gives the drop an 
elongated form, is by no means done by chance, nor is it a 
matter of indifference with those insects. It seems, on the - 
contrary, to have been regulated by a sage police, to pre- 
serve cleanliness among this little people, or to guarantee 
from pollution, both the insect itself, who throws his excre- 
