416 
APPENDIX. 
growing, which the ants seemed to prefer to everything else. The 
rose-trees were soon defoliated, and great havoc was made amongst 
the cabbages. I followed them to their nest, and found it about two 
hundred yards from the one of the year before. I poured down the 
burrows, as before, several buckets of water with carbolic acid. The 
water is required to carry the acid down to the lowest chambers. 
The ants, as before, were at once withdrawn from my garden; and 
two days afterwards, on visiting the place, I found all the survivors 
at work on one track that led directly to the old nest of the year be¬ 
fore, where the} 7 were busily employed making fresh excavations. 
Many were bringing along pieces of the ant-food from the old to the 
new nests ; others carried the undeveloped white pupae and larvae. 
It was a wholesale and entire migration ; and the next day the formi- 
carium down which I had last poured the carbolic acid was entirely 
deserted. 
“Don Francisco Velasquez informed me in 1870 that he had a 
powder which made the ants mad, so that they bit and destroyed each 
other. He gave me a little of it, and it proved to be corrosive subli¬ 
mate. I made several trials of it, and found it most efficacious in 
turning a large column of the ants. A little of it sprinkled across 
one of their paths in dry weather has a most surprising effect. As 
soon as one of the ants touches the white powder it commences to 
run about wildly, and to attack any other ant it comes across. In a 
couple of hours round balls of the ants will be found all biting each 
other; and numerous individuals will be seen bitten completely in 
two, whilst others have lost some of their legs or antennae. News of 
the commotion is carried to the formicarium, and huge fellows, meas¬ 
uring three quarters of an inch in length, that only come out of the 
nest during a migration or an attack on the nest or one of the work- 
ing columns, are seen stalking down with a determined air, as if the} 
would soon right matters. As soon, however, as they have touched 
the sublimate, all their stateliness leaves them; they rush about, theii 
legs are seized hold of by 7 some of the smaller ants already affected 
by the poison, and they themselves begin to bite, and in a short time 
become the centre of fresh balls of rabid ants.” 1 
I wish I could quote all Mr. Belt’s interesting article; for 
his conclusion as to the use the ants make of the bits of leaf 
they are so incessantly collecting, is an ingenious one, and piob- 
ably true. It is certain that the little fellows are never seen 
1 Thomas Belt, The Naturalist in Nicaragua, p. 71. 
