ng I saw a party going forth on what has been supposed to be a
slave-hunting expedition. They came to a stick, which, being inclosed in
a white-ant gallery, I knew contained numbers of this insect; but I
was surprised to see the black soldiers passing without 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 holding the
necks of the white ants too tightly with their mandibles, as that is
the way they seize them; but even the pupae which I took from the
soldier-ants, though placed in a favorable temperature, never became
developed. In addition to this, if 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 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 likely 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 farther on. Every ant in the
colony seemed to be employed in this 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