79 



Thorax small and brown. Abdomen the same colour, and smaller than the head, with a small erected 

 scale placed between it and the thorax. Legs red brown, having a long tibial spur in the four hinder 

 legs. 



Drury referred this species to the Formica barbara of Linnieus, which is not only dis- 

 tinct in the colour of the head, which is red, but also in having two knots at the base of 

 the abdomen, whence it belongs to the genus Myrmica. 



The reader will find some interestino- general details relative to the habits of the exotic 

 species of the family to which this insect belongs, in the following observations which were 

 published in the preface to the third volume, in the former edition of this work. 



" The various species of ants, cock-roaches, and other voracious vermin, are so numerous 

 as to be one of the greatest plagues the collector abroad has to encounter, insomuch that it 

 is barely possible to preserve dried insects, and other animals, with the utmost care and 

 the closest boxes, much less living ones, which require light and air : for as soon as cater- 

 pillars are brought out of the woods, and placed within doors, with an intention of breeding 

 them, they seem to be, as in fact they are, out of the order of nature, and quicklv fall 

 victims to the rapacity of those agents whose province it is to remove animal or vegetable 

 bodies, which having arisen to maturity, or lost the principles of life, are on their progress 

 toward a slow dissolution, a state of useless inanimation or noxious putrescence. Indeed 

 among these none are more useful in this point of view than the ants ; but, considered as 

 noxious vcrniln, and capable of destroying animals, or, in many instances, of preventing and 

 frustrating human industry, we know perhaps of none more formidable. These insects, 

 whether considered as the efficient servants of nature, keeping clean and wholesome the 

 iace of the creation, or as the ministers of Almighty Power preserving a due equality 

 between animals and vegetables, perform, without exemption or reserve, his high behests. 

 Like the angel of heaven, they walk steadily forward in the line ordained them, and spare 

 neither magiiitude nor beauty, neither the living nor the dead, but sweep away all kinds of 

 animal substances with undeviating rigour and rapacious perseverance. 



" Sometimes they proceed, like those I have mentioned in the preface to my first volume, 

 driving all the inhabitants out of a town in a few hours, to a scene of which Mr. Smeath- 

 man was an eye-witness ; and in other instances, as within the last twenty years, in some of 

 the Caribbee Islands, like a slow but irresistible fire, they gradually, in two or three years, 

 take possession of the land, and carry death and destruction to every kind of animals ; so 

 that not only pigeons and fowls, lambs and kids, but even calves and foals, which have 

 been brought forth in the night, have been destroyed before the rising of the sun ; and 

 the inhabitants themselves, though they placed the posts of their beds in troughs of water, 

 were driven out of them by these inevitable disturbers. This slow but enormous increase 

 of ants in some of the sugar islands was unknown before the conclusion of the last peace ; 

 since which time they seem, in conjunction with some other insects, to have taken 

 possession of many valuable sugar estates, and, by sucking the canes, have rendered 



