ANTS — FUNEREAL HABITS. 
91 
used as burial-ground and sort of kitchen -midden, where all the 
refuse of the nest was deposited. Mrs. Treat has informed me 
that her artificial nests of crudelis behaved in precisely the 
same wav. 
t J 
An interesting fact in the funereal habits of Formica san~ 
guinea was related to me by this lady. A visit was paid to a large 
colony of these slave-makers, which is established on the grounds 
adjoining her residence at Vineland, New Jersey. I noticed 
that a number of carcasses of one of the slave species, Formica 
fusca , were deposited together quite near the gates of the nest. 
These were probably chiefly the dry bodies of ants brought in 
from recent raids. It was noticed that the dead ants were all 
of one species, and thereupon Mrs. Treat informed me that the 
red slave-makers never deposited their dead with those of 
their black servitors, but always laid them by themselves, not 
in groups, but separately, and were careful to take them a 
considerable distance from the nest. One can hardly resist 
pointing here another likeness between the customs of these 
social hymenopters and those of human beings, certain of whom 
carry their distinctions of race, condition, or religious caste, even 
to the gates of the cemetery in which the poor body moulders 
into its mother dust ! 
It will be observed that none of these accounts furnish 
evidence of ants burying their dead, as Pliny asserts to 
have been the case with ants in the south of Europe. In 
the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society, however (1861), 
there is a very definite account of such a practice as 
obtaining among the ants of Sydney ; and although it is 
from the pen of an observer not well known, the observa- 
tion seems to have been one about which there could 
scarcely have been a mistake. The observer was Mrs. 
Hutton, and this is her account. Having killed a number 
of 6 soldier ants,’ and returning half an hour afterwards to 
the place where the dead bodies w^ere lying, she says : 
I saw a large number of ants surrounding the dead ones. 1 
determined to watch their proceedings closely. I followed four 
or five that started off from the rest towards a hillock a short 
distance off, in which was an ants’ nest. This they entered, and 
in about five minutes they reappeared, followed by others. All 
fell into rank, walking regularly and slowly two by two, until 
they arrived at the spot where lay the dead bodies of the soldier 
ants. In a few minutes two of the ants advanced and took up 
