92 
ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 
the dead body of one of their comrades ; then two others, and 
so on, until all were ready to march. First walked two ants 
bearing a body, then two without a burden ; then two others 
with another dead ant, and so on, until the line was extended 
to about forty pairs, and the procession now moved slowly on- 
wards, followed by an irregular body of about two hundred ants. 
Occasionally the two laden ants stopped, and laying down the 
dead ant, it was taken up by the two walking unburdened behind 
them, and thus, by occasionally relieving each other, they 
arrived at a sandy spot near the sea. The body of ants now 
commenced digging with their jaws a number of holes in the 
ground, into each of which a dead ant was laid, where they now 
laboured on until they had filled up the ants’ graves. This 
did not quite finish the remarkable circum seances attending 
this funeral of the ants. Some six or seven of the ants 
had attempted to run off without performing their share of 
the task of digging; these were caught and brought back, when 
they were at once attacked by the body of ants and killed upon 
the spot. A single grave was quickly dug, and they were all 
dropped into it. 
The Rev. W. Farren White also, in his papers on ants 
published in the ‘Leisure Hour 5 (1880), after alluding to 
the above case, corroborates it by some interesting obser- 
vations of his own. He says : — 
Several of the little sextons I observed with dead in their 
mandibles, and one in the act of burying a corpse. . . . 
I should mention that the dead are not interred without con- 
siderable difficulty, in consequence of the sides of the trays being 
almost perpendicular. The work of the sextons continued until 
no dead bodies remained upon the surface of the nest, but all 
were interred in the extramural cemeteries. Afterwards I 
removed the trays, and turned the contents of the formicarium 
upside down, and then I placed six trays on the surface of the 
earth, two of which I filled with sugar for food. All six were 
used freely as cemeteries, being crowded with the corpses of 
the little people and their young, the larvae which had perished 
in the disruption of their home. 
I have noticed in one of my formicaria a subterranean 
cemetery, where I have seen some ants burying their dead by 
placing earth above them. One ant was evidently much affected, 
and tried to exhume the bodies, but the united exertions of the 
yellow sextons were more than sufficient to neutralise the effort 
of the disconsolate mourner. The cemetery was now converted 
