322 EXCAVATED ARCHITECTURE. 



statures, are more gigantic by a thousandfold than the sculp- 

 tured Elephanta or the erected Edfou. Tiny architects are 

 these, to whom bees and wasps are veritable giants ; and yet 

 their excavated dwellings, chiselled not indeed in stone, but 

 wood, not in the heart of rocks, but in the heart of oaks, 

 will occupy sometimes the whole interior of a massive tree. 

 These also are " carpenters ' - carpenter ants, their craft 

 headed by the jetty emmet.* Their entire structures are, of 

 course, too bulky for transportation to this our museum gal- 

 lery ; but here, in some several fragments, we may look upon 

 their " walls, their galleries separated by partitions with oval 

 apertures or door-ways, their pillars, arches, columns, and 

 arcades;" all wrought with wondrous lightness and delicacy, 

 and all dyed of a dark, bordering on a blackish hue, how 

 produced would seem uncertain, but peculiar to the excavations 

 of these jet-black labourers not the only ones which cut their 

 sculptured cities in the trunks of trees. 



But these " carpenters' must no longer detain us, or we 

 shall want time to bestow a glance, even, upon their brother 

 " Weavers." Upon the process of their manufacture we 

 hardly can, though many are here assembled and busy at their 

 work. "We may look, however, at a few collected specimens of 

 their clever spinning, as exhibited in a variety of cocoons, from 

 the looms chiefly of "Moths as Operatives* in their cater- 

 pillar estate. But before we examine the fabrics they have 



* Formica fuliginosa . 



