538 
BLACK SOLDIEK-ANTS. 
Chap. XXVII. 
witliout touching it. I lifted up the stick and broke a portion of 
the gallery, and then laid it across the path in the middle of the 
black regiment. The white ants, when uncovered, scampered 
about with great celerity, hiding themselves under the leaves, but 
attracted little attention from the black marauders, till one of the 
leaders caught them, and applying his sting, laid them in an 
instant on one side in a state of coma; the others then promptly 
seized them and rushed off. On first observing these marauding 
insects at Kolobeng, I had the idea, imbibed from a work of no less 
authority than Brougham’s Paley, that they seized the white ants 
in order to make them slaves; but having rescued a number of 
captives, I placed them aside, and found that they never recovered 
from the state of insensibility into which they had been thrown by 
the leaders. I supposed then that the insensibility had been caused 
by the soldiers holdiug the necks of the wliite ants too tightly 
with their mandibles, as that is the way they seize them; but even 
the pupse which I took from the soldier ants, though placed in a 
favourable temperature, never became developed. In addition to 
this, ff any one examines the orifice by which the black ant enters 
his barracks, he will always find a little heap of hard heads and 
legs of the white ants, showing that these black ruffians are a grade 
lower than slave-stealers, being actually cannibals. Elsewhere, I 
have seen a body of them removing their eggs from a place in 
which they were hkely to be flooded by the rains; I calculated 
their numbers to be 1260; they carried their eggs a certain 
distance, then laid them down, when others took them and carried 
them further on. Every ant in the colony seemed to be employed 
in tliis laborious occupation, yet there was not a white slave-ant 
among them. One cold morning, I observed a band of another 
species of black ant, returning each with a captive: there could be 
no doubt of their cannibal propensities, for the ‘‘brutal soldiery” 
had already deprived the white ants of their legs. The fluid in 
the stings of this species, is of an intensely acid taste. 
I had often noticed the stupefaction produced by the injection 
of a fluid from the sting of certain insects before. It is particu¬ 
larly observable in a hymenopterous insect called the plasterer 
{Felopmis EcMoni), which in its habits resembles somewhat the 
mason-bee. It is about an inch and a quarter in length, jet black 
in colour, and may be observed coming into houses, carrying in 
