(374 Bulletin American Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XXIII, 



"It was in this manner that Hun-Canie and Vukub-Came were van- 

 quished by Hunahpu and Xbalanque, and this was the beginning of their 

 labors. Thenceforth, too, the Purpueks had their mouths cleft, and cleft 

 they are to this day." ^ 



I am also indebted to Mr. Bandelier for the following extracts from the 

 early historians of the Conquest. Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes 

 in his 'Historia de las Indias' (1535) gives an account of the pernicious ants 

 and termites of Espanola (Santo Domingo). Among the former are certain 

 species "which do very great damage throughout the island, in the planta- 

 tions, destroying and burning up the cane and oranges and other useful 

 plants." These ants must have been the large species of Atta, probably 

 ^-1. insularis, which does great damage to plantations also in the adjacent 

 island of Cuba. 



P. Bernabe Cobo, in his 'Historia de Neuvo Mundo' (1653) also describes 

 a number of noxious ants in Santo Domingo. He says: "There is another 

 kind of large ants which the Chiriquan Indians call Iczau, and it is these 

 which eat the trees and whose young, when new^ly hatched, are called Icza, 

 and are eaten by the Indians." These Iczau are evidently the virgin females 

 of Atta. They are a' so eaten by the Brazilian Indians who call them I^as, 

 according to von Ihering (1894). Cobo seems to be the first author to record 

 the use of the heads of Atta soldiers by the Indians for 'surgical purposes: 

 "They use a certain species of the said ants, because they bite severely, for 

 closing wounds instead of stitching them with a needle. This is done in the 

 following manner: they bring together the skin of the two sides of the wound 

 and apply these ants, which bite and hold the two sides or lips together and 

 then they cut off the insects' heads, which remain attached to the wound 

 with their mouths or mandibles as firmly closed as they were in life." 



Specimens of the large Attoe were, of course, taken to Europe by the 

 early travelers. Seba (1734-35) gives a good figure of a soldier of A. 

 cephalotes or sexdens which found its way into his collection. Linne de- 

 scribed both of these species, and they were also known to Fabricius and 

 Latreille. The latter authors, apparently misled by the accounts of Mile. 

 Merian (1771), confounded the habits of these ants with those of the "fourmis 

 de visites," or Ecitons. 



The first naturalist to publish observations on any of the North American 

 Attii was Buckley (1860), who studied the habits of Atta texana at Austin, 

 Texas. He was evidently under the impression that this ant eats the leaves, 

 berries, etc., which it carries into its nests. He unearthed some of the 



' Here the guardians pass into the domain of fable; they become night birds, the one called 

 Purpuek, the other Puhuy, which is a species of owl ; at the present time the former is pronounced 

 Parpuek. (Commentator's note.) 



