It has been said, remarks Mr. Southey, and regarded as a vulgar error, that Ants cannot pass over a line of chalk: the fact, however, is certain. Mr. Coleridge tried the experiment at Malta, he continues, and immediately discovered the cause: The formic acid is so powerful, that it acts upon the chalk, and the legs of the insect are burnt by the instantaneous effervescence![586]
Paxamus says, that if you take some Ants and burn them, you will drive away the others, as experience has taught us.
Ants also, he continues, will not touch a vessel with honey, although the vessel may happen to be without its cover, if you wrap it in white wool, or if you scatter white earth or ruddle round it. If a person, continues Paxamus, takes a grain of wheat carried by an Ant with the thumb of his left hand, and lays it in a skin of Phœnician dye, and ties it round the head of his wife, it will prove to be the cause of abortion in a state of gestation.[587]
Pliny says the proper remedy for the venom of the Solipuga or Solpuga Ant, and for that of all kinds of Ants, is a bat’s heart.[588]
Callicrates used to make Ants, and other such little creatures, out of ivory, with so much skill and ingenuity that other men could not discern the counterfeits from the originals even with the help of glasses.[589]
Vespidæ—Wasps, Hornets.
Concerning the generation of the Wasp, Topsel and Moufet have the following: “Isidore affirms that Wasps come out of the putrefied carkasses of asses, although he may be mistaken, for all agree that the Scarabees are procreated from them: rather am I of opinion with Pliny, 1. ii. c. 20, and the Greek authors, that they are sprung from the dead bodies of horses, for the horse is a valiant and warlike creature, hence is that verse frequently and commonly used among the Greeks:
Wasps come from horses, Bees from bulls are bred.
And indeed their more than ordinary swiftnesse and their eagernesse in fight, are sufficient arguments that they can take their original from no other creature (much less from an asse, hart, or oxe) since that Nature never granted to any creatures else, to excel both in swiftness and valour. And surely that I may give another sense of that proverb of Aristotle,
Hail the daughters of the wing-footed steed: