64 The Naturalist in Nicaragua 
exposed to observation. I found their nests below to consist 
of numerous rounded chambers, about as large as a man’s 
head, connected together by tunnelled passages leading 
from one chamber to another. Notwithstanding that many 
columns of the ants were continually carrying in the cut 
leaves, I could never find any quantity of these in the 
burrows, and it was evident that they were used up in some 
way immediately they were brought in. The chambers were 
always about three parts filled with a speckled, brown, floc- 
culent, spongy-looking mass of a light and loosely connected 
substance. Throughout these masses were numerous ants 
belonging to the smallest division of the workers, which do 
not engage in leaf-carrying. Along with them were pupze 
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NEST OF LEAF-CUTTING ANT 
and larve, not gathered together, but dispersed, apparently 
irregularly, throughout the flocculent mass. This mass, 
which I have called the ant-food, proved, on examination, 
to be composed of minutely subdivided pieces of leaves, 
withered to a brown colour, and overgrown and lightly con- 
nected together by a minute white fungus that ramified in 
every direction throughout it. I not only found this fungus 
in every chamber I opened, but also in the chambers of the 
nest of a distinct species that generally comes out only in the 
night-time, often entering houses and carrying off various 
farinaceous substances, and which does not make mounds 
above its nests, but long, winding passages, terminating in 
chambers similar to the common species, and always, like 
them, three parts filled with flocculent masses of fungus- 
covered vegetable matter, amongst which are the ant-nurses 
and immature ants. When a nest is disturbed, and the 
