200 E. A. ANDREWS 



floors. Around the low periphery of this domed chamber are 

 a dozen to twenty exits into neighboring chambers and passage- 

 ways w^hich may be from 5 by 15 or 20 to 3 by 6 mm. and with 

 no system. The ceihng of the chamber seems thinner than the 

 floor, perhaps; the ceihng J to i mm. ; the floor ^ to i to i^ mm. 

 The peripheral exits are rounded holes of small size, some are 

 only 3 by 4 mm. In the neighborhood of these chambers, of 

 which there is but one for each community, it is very evident 

 that there is much reconstruction of the nest going on and this 

 holds for other regions also. Thus there are incomplete parti- 

 tions apparently in various stages of removal and minute win- 

 dows from passage to passage only i to 2 mm. wide, which appear 

 to be passageways that are being closed up. 



One remarkable element in the nest was frequently found 

 but not always, that is the stored up food masses described bv 

 H. G. Hubbard in the Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., 1877, pages 

 267-274 and comparable to the " fungus gardens " of authors. 

 These nodules are much lighter in color than the nest material 

 and strike the attention at once as being concretion-like masses 

 filling and replacing the chambers of the nest. At first they were 

 thought to be fungus growths, from their color and evident 

 slow concentric growth and filling up of the cavities. But micro- 

 scopic examination reveals only such stray hyphae and fungus 

 spores as might come on the surface from accidental contamina- 

 tion, while the central solid parts are purely such as might be 

 made .like the nest itself by the work of the termites. Reduced 

 to fine powder or cut into sections the material of the nodules 

 is seen to be bits of vegetable tissue mingled with a yellow 

 amorphous substance. The vegetable tissue is in the form of 

 fragments of cell walls, many of which give the cellulose reaction 

 with chloriodide of zinc. The entire mass may be looked at as 

 torn cell walls mingled with some material that may be secreted 

 by the termites or else collected as food from some unknown 

 source. It is a sort of vegetable concrete which falls apart in 

 hot KClOj + HNO;, into small masses of irregularly packed cell 

 walls suggesting manipulated mouthfuls of wood in which all 

 natural association of cells has been destroyed. These masses 

 must be held together by some matrix or cement. Scattered 

 through the macerated mass are setae from the termites. 



The amount of this material is sometimes very great : one nest 



