had passed before I began my toilette, and when they returned they were totally at a loss to find the way home, though they continued searching for it nearly half an hour.  It was found only by one making a long circuit round the wetted spot.  The scent may have indicated also the propriety of their going in one direction only.  If a handful of earth is thrown on the path at the middle of the regiment, either on its way home or abroad, those behind it are completely at a loss as to their farther progress.  Whatever it may be that guides them, they seem only to know that they are not to return, for they come up to the handful of earth, but will not cross it, though not a quarter of an inch high.  They wheel round and regain their path again, but never think of retreating to the nest, or to the place where they have been stealing.  After a quarter of an hour’s confusion and hissing, one may make a circuit of a foot round the earth, and soon all follow in that roundabout way.  When on their way to attack the abode of the white ants, the latter may be observed rushing about in a state of great perturbation.  The black leaders, distinguished from the rest by their greater size, especially in the region of the sting, then seize the white ants one by one, and inflict a sting, which seems to inject a portion of fluid similar in effect to chloroform, as it renders them insensible, but not dead, and only able to move one or two front legs.  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.  In addition to this, if any one examines