round abdomen until they can hold no more, having stretched their skins literally to the very point of bursting.  They pass their time, like the Fat Boy in ‘Pickwick,’ chiefly in sleeping, but they cling upside down meanwhile to the roof of their residence.  When the workers in turn require a meal, they go up to the nearest honey-bearer and stroke her gently with their antennae.  The honey-bearer thereupon throws up her head and regurgitates a large drop of the amber liquid. (’Regurgitates’ is a good word which I borrow from Dr. McCook, of Philadelphia, the great authority upon honey-ants; and it saves an immense deal of trouble in looking about for a respectable periphrasis.) The workers feed upon the drops thus exuded, two or three at once often standing around the living honey-jar, and lapping nectar together from the lips of their devoted comrade.  This may seem at first sight rather an unpleasant practice on the part of the ants; but after all, how does it really differ from our own habit of eating honey which has been treated in very much the same unsophisticated manner by the domestic bee?

Worse things than these, however, Dr. McCook records to the discredit of the Colorado honey-ant.  When he was opening some nests in the Garden of the Gods, he happened accidentally to knock down some of the rotunds, which straightway burst asunder in the middle, and scattered their store of honey on the floor of the nest.  At once the other ants, tempted away from their instinctive task of carrying off the cocoons and young grubs, clustered around their unfortunate companion, like street boys around a broken molasses barrel, and, instead of forming themselves forthwith into a volunteer ambulance company, proceeded immediately to lap up the honey from their dying brother.  On the other hand it must be said, to the credit of the race, that (unlike the members of Arctic expeditions) they never desecrate the remains of the dead.  When a honey-bearer dies at his post, a victim to his zeal for the common good, the workers carefully remove his cold corpse from the roof where it still clings, clip off the head and shoulders from the distended abdomen, and convey their deceased brother piecemeal, in two detachments, to the formican cemetery, undisturbed.  If they chose, they might only bury the front half of their late relation, while they retained his remaining moiety as an available honey-bag:  but from this cannibal proceeding ant-etiquette recoils in decent horror; and the amber globes are ’pulled up galleries, rolled along rooms, and bowled into the graveyard, along with the juiceless heads, legs, and other members.’  Such fraternal conduct would be very creditable to the worker honey-ants, were it not for a horrid doubt insinuated by Dr. McCook that perhaps the insects don’t know they could get at the honey by breaking up the body of their lamented relative.  If so, their apparent disregard of utilitarian considerations may really be due not to their sentimentality but to their hopeless stupidity.