HOUSE ANTS— TRIALS OF NATURALISTS. 



597 



the Indians, who eat the abdomen, either raw or roasted. The taste is said to be 

 agreeably saccharine. 



Not satisfied with devouring his harvests, the tropical ants, as I have already men- 

 tioned, leave man no rest even within doors, and trespass upon his household comforts 

 in a thousand various ways. In Mainas, a province on the Upper Amazon, Professor 

 Poppig counted no less than seven different species of ants among the tormenting 

 inmates of his hut. The diminutive red Amache was particularly fond of sweets. 

 Favored by its smallness, it penetrates through the imperceptible openings of a cork, 

 and the traveler was often obliged to throw away the syrup which in that humid and 

 sultry country replaces the use of crystallized sugar, from its having been changed 

 into an ant-comfit. This troublesome lover of sweets lives under the corner-posts of 

 the hut, so thart it is quite impossible to dislodge him. The number of the Paca ticse, 

 a red ant, of the ordinary size, was still greater ; the trunks and papers were swarming 

 with it, in spite of every precaution, so that it was quite incomprehensible how it found 

 means to overcome all the obstacles that had been devised against it. 



^* The only possible way," says Stedman, "of keeping the ants from the refined 

 sugar is by hanging the loaf to the ceiling by a nail, and making a ring of dry chalk 

 around it, very thick, which crumbles down the moment the ants attempt to pass it. 

 I imagined that placing my sugar-boxes in the middle of a tub, and on stone surrounded 

 by deep water, would have kept back this formidable enemy ; but to no purpose : 

 whole armies of the lighter sort, to my astonishment, marched over the surface, and 

 but very few of them were drowned. The main body constantly scaled the rock, and, 

 in spite of all my efforts, made their entry through the keyholes, after which, the only 

 way to clear the garrison is, to expose it to a hot sun, which the invaders can not bear, 

 and all march off in a few minutes." 



The devastations of the house-ants are peculiarly hateful to the naturalist, whose 

 collections, often gathered with so much danger and trouble, they pitilessly destroy. 

 Schomburgk suspended boxes with insects from the ceiling by threads strongly rubbed 

 over with arsenic soap ; but when, on the following morning, he wished to examine his 

 treasures, instead of his rare and beautiful specimens he found nothing but a set of 

 infamous red ants, who, crawling down the threads, had found means to invade the 

 boxes and utterly to destroy their valuable contents. 



Wallace gives a feeling description of the ants of Dorey, one of the islands of the 

 Indian Ocean: ** One small black kind was excessively abundant. Almost every 

 shrub and tree was more or less infested with it, and its large papery nests were 

 everywhere to be seen. They immediately took possession of my house, building a 

 large nest in the roof, and forming papery tunnels down almost every post. They 

 swarmed on my table as I was at work setting out my insects, carrying them off from 

 under my very nose, and even tearing them off from the cards on which they were 

 gummed, if I left them for an instant. They crawled continually over my hands and 

 face, got into my hair, and roamed at wiil over my whole body, not producing much 

 inconvenience till they began to bite, which they would do on meeting with any 

 obstruction to their passage, and with a sharpness which made me jump again, and 

 rush to undress and turn out the offender. They visited my bed also, so that night 

 brought no relief from their persecutions ; and I verily believe that during my three 

 and a half months* residence at Dorey I was never for a single hour free from them. 



