40 



opposite bank, remarking our anxiety, came and offered us 

 whole handfuls of them ; and directing us to the spot where 

 they had caught them, our astonishment is not to be ex- 

 pressed, when we beheld millions of winged insects, issuing 

 into daylight, through fissures in the earth, and through 

 the pores, as it were, of the ground, where no opening was 

 perceptible. Near these outlets, the children had posted 

 themselves, and collecting the insects as they emerged, 

 greedily devoured them. Such of them as escaped the Hot- 

 tentots, were snapped up as they flew along by the small 

 birds, and by the LibelluloB and other predatory flies. The 

 body of these tiny insects is so small, and the wings are so 

 large and unwieldy, that they could hardly support them- 

 selves in the air, as they floated along at the humour of the 

 breeze. They were the males of the Termes capensis ; com- 

 monly known by the name of the WJiite Ant. 



" No country in the world is more infested with ants than 

 the Cape. These insects vary in size, from the red Nigar, 

 scarcely visible to the naked eye, to the Black Ant, measuring 

 nearly an inch in length. Their habitations are as various 

 as their species. The smaller tribes excavate the ground, 

 removing the soil, and depositing it as a rampart round the 

 entrance, to keep off the water. The large black ants con- 

 tent themselves with enlarging such cavities as they find 

 ready formed, under flat stones, thus providing themselves 

 with an impenetrable roof. A smaller species of the same 

 colour, constructs its nest on the top of a bush, enclosing 

 such parts of the branches as come within the sphere of the 

 external covering, which is as thin as paper, yet proof against 

 the heaviest rain. But the most numerous and interesting 

 insects are the Termites, of which the Cape furnishes several 

 kinds. Of these, one species builds its nests on the sur- 

 face of the ground. These are fabricated of loam, of an 

 hemisphaerical shape, four or five feet high, and as much in 

 diameter. In some districts, these nests cover the surface of 

 the ground in immense numbers, standing within a few yards 

 of each other, and resembling so many boulders of granite. 

 Struck with the prodigious disproportion between the size of 



