Letters, Announcements, S^c. 



383 



got the two eggs out^ and then very carefully made a cross- 

 section through the ants' nest, so as to divide the boring 

 made by the Woodpecker longitudinally. 



a, entrance-tunnel made by Woodpecker ; b, retort-shaped nesting-cham- 

 ber of Woodpecker; c, excavations made by the ants; ddd .. . .d, 

 entrances to them ; ///• . . ./, tunnels made by the ants ; fff/, fork of 

 pyingado branch— one twig passing through the egg-chamber ex- 

 cavated by the Woodpecker. 



"The accompanying is a rough diagrammatic sketch of 

 the appearance of the cross-section of the nest as hollowed 

 out by the Woodj)eckers. The ants' nest was a large sphe- 

 rical solid mass of leaves and clay, the leaves outside being 

 arranged one over the other something like the tiles on the 

 roof of a house, but riddled in many places with the entrance- 

 tunnels made by the ants — a small black and red species of 

 Myrmica, the trivial or specific name of which I do not 

 known. It is probably closely allied to the Myrmica men- 

 tioned by Sir J. Lubbock in his ' Ants, Bees, Wasps,' as 

 having been described by Sykes in the '^ Trans. Ent. Soc' 

 vol. i. Very few of the ants remained in the nest, and the 



