As The Leaders Toss Them
On One Side, The Rank And File Seize Them And Carry Them Off.
One morning 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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 802 of 1070
Words from 230268 to 230537
of 306638
