ts, we have constantly found that the ants, _with
their mouths full_, fight with each other, or with their brother
captives, and are quite unaware of their bondage. For while most other
insects, on opening the net, are glad to escape by flying or leaping,
these will remain as if to secure their booty, and turn even
misfortunes to account. Often have we watched their battles, which are
battles indeed!--battles, in which every man of them seems to think
the day depends on his own courage and activity. We have never been
able to make out which were the best battalions of these variously
coloured troops; for all of them fight to the death, and _show no
quarter_. We have seen on some large tree the ants running up and
down, and picking off individual enemies from a horde of smaller kind
and reddish colour below. We have occasionally knocked off one or two
of the giants, who, falling alive into the midst of their enemies,
were surrounded, spread-eagled, trampled upon, and either lacerated to
death, or killed by their own _formic acid_, in a very short space of
time indeed. We have seen all this and marvelled; but we were never
sufficiently in the confidence of either the invaders or the invaded
to know their motives for fighting. It could not be for territory, for
they had all the world before them; it could not be for food, for they
were full.

We never could make out why flies seem _fond of walking over dead
spiders_; for we will not impute to them our unworthy feelings of
enduring hatred and hostility. That insects had no brains in their
heads to direct and guide their progressive movements, or form focuses
for their passions, had long ago to us been plain. Besides all that we
once committed ourselves by writing on the subject, we have done many
other cruel things; such as dividing insects, (whether at the union of
the head with corselet, or of the corselet with the abdomen,) and we
have found that the segments to which the members were articulated
carried on their functions _without the head_. The Elytra would open
the wings, and the legs would move, as by association they had moved
in the perfect insect. The guidance of the head was destroyed, yet the
legs pushed the abdomen and corselet on; so that a disapproving friend
had to _divide_ his sympathy, and to _feel for each of the pieces_.
And what appeared to us worthy of remark was, that whereas, when a
snake was decollated, it was only the tail that continued to
wriggl