1882.J 
Vegetable Soil. 
38i 
the crag and picked off its surface the minute disintegrated 
particles. In such cases it is evidently a building-up process 
which buries the stones. This is quite an exceptional case, 
as you might travel these crags for weeks before you met 
such an ant-hill. In fa 6t at the present moment I can only 
remember one locality in which I saw them, and that was in 
Glencolombkill barony of Burren, Co. Clare, but I think I 
also saw them elsewhere. 
Worms leave a stone that ants come to, but after the ants 
have left it you will find worms in the old ant-soil, and their 
castings on the old ant-hills. Worms seem to have an anti- 
pathy to ants. I have over and over again put them travel- 
ling towards an ant-hill, and in a few cases they have gone 
straight on into it, but in general they appear to smell the 
ants, and suddenly will begin to travel backward, and get 
away as quickly as possible. If he goes into the ant-hill he 
is stung to death nearly immediately. 
In May, 1881, a flat stone, 2 feet long by 10 inches wide, 
and nearly 3 inches thick, was put on the surface over a dog’s 
grave in a rhododendra shrubbery ; the grass was cut about 
July, but the after grass was let rot ; and in January (1882) 
the stone was nearly covered, there not being a trace of 
worm-work alongside or over it, while under it were two 
worms and some beetles. I expected that, as the dead grass 
around and over it formed into mould, the worms would 
appear, but when I again examined it in the beginning of 
March I could not see a trace of one, and on raising the 
stone I found a colony of ants there, which evidently had 
hunted away the worms. 
In Ireland, as a general rule, if you unstone or clear land 
(that is, take the large surface blocks off it), let the land be 
mountain slopes or lowland, you find most or all of the 
erratics resting on the subsoil, and buried more or less in 
vegetable soil. From this it would appear to me that the 
stones could not possibly have sunk, but that the soil must 
have grown up around them. Most of this stony land was 
cleared of its woods between 200 and 300 years ago ; some, 
however, at a later date. The usual charadler of these 
tracts of stony ground, before they are reclaimed, is a mossy 
or heathery waste, — or a rushy or swampy traft, in which 
ants may work, but no worms, except in very isolated spots ; 
but after they are stoned, drained, tilled, and eventually 
laid down in grass, they are as much frequented by worms 
as any other grass land. I reclaimed, thirty years ago, 
about 30 acres that were in part a swamp and in part a 
heathy waste, and now it is in grass land and full of worms, 
which could not live in it formerly. 
