46 



PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 



I discovered they were insects. The boat was sent, and 

 brought a bucket full of them on board ; — they proved to be 

 a large species of ant, and extended from the upper part of 

 Salt-pan Reach out towards the Great Nore, a distance of five 

 or six miles. The column appeared to be in breadth eight or 

 ten feet, and in height about six inches, which I suppose must 

 have been from their resting one upon another." Purchas 

 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 Bartholomew, 1613, I 

 was in the island of Foulness on our Essex shore, where were 

 such clouds of these flying pismires, 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 them- 

 selves about that time of the year in the sea." 1 



These ants were winged : whence, in the first instance here 

 related, this immense column came was not ascertained. 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 Couronnes, 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 colo- 

 nies, doing all the work, as I have related in a former letter, 

 that is usually done by the neuters. 2 M. P. Huber has 

 found incipient colonies, in which were only a few workers 



1 Pilgrimage, 1090. 



2 M. Huber observes that fecundated females, after they have lost their wings, 

 make themselves a subterranean cell ; some singly, others in common. From 

 which it appears that some colonies have more than one female from their first 

 establishment. 



