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We had a quantity of common brown carbolic acid, about a pint of which I mixed with four buckets of water, and, after stirring it well about, poured it down the burrows; I could hear it rumbling down to the lowest depths of the formicarium four or five feet from the surface.
The whole arrangement of a Formicarium, or ant-colony, and all the varied activity of ant-life, are directed to one main purpose the perpetuation and dissemination of the species. Most of the labour which we see performed by the workers has for its end the sustenance and welfare of the young brood, which are helpless grubs.
I do not doubt that some of the leading minds in this formicarium recollected the nest of the year before, and directed the migration to it. 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 sublimate.
The Henbane of the Bishops. Marmotretus de baboonis et apis, cum Commento Dorbellis. Decretum Universitatis Parisiensis super gorgiasitate muliercularum ad placitum. The Apparition of Sancte Geltrude to a Nun of Poissy, being in travail at the bringing forth of a child. The Mustard-pot of Penance. The Gamashes, alias the Boots of Patience. Formicarium artium.
They climb the tree, station themselves on the edge of a leaf and make a circular incision with their scissor-like jaws; the piece of leaf, about the size of a sixpence, held vertically between the jaws, is then borne off to the formicarium.
News of the commotion is carried to the formicarium, and huge fellows, measuring 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 working columns, are seen stalking down with a determined air, as if they would soon right matters.
Gray could not well procure them a specimen. Metallic tractors. Holloway's Ointment. Electro-biology. Valentine Greatrakes his Stroking Cure. Spirit-rapping. Holloway's Pills. Morison's Pills. Homoeopathy. Parr's Life Pills. Mesmerism. Pure Bosh. Exorcisms, for which the read Maleus Maleficarum, Nideri Formicarium, Delrio, Wierus, etc. But could not get one that mentioned water-babies.
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 formicarium down which I had last poured the carbolic acid was entirely deserted. I afterwards found that when much disturbed, and many of the ants destroyed, the survivors migrate to a new locality.
After travelling for some hundreds of yards, often for more than half a mile, the formicarium is reached. It consists of low, wide mounds of brown, clayey-looking earth, above and immediately around which the bushes have been killed by their buds and leaves having been persistently bitten off as they attempted to grow after their first defoliation.
The effect was all I could have wished: the marauding parties were at once drawn off from my garden to meet the new danger at home. The whole formicarium was disorganised. Big fellows came stalking up from the cavernous regions below, only to descend again in the utmost perplexity.
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