26 



liable. It is probable that not one third of the eggs come to per- 

 fection, and were it not for the myriads that are laid, there would be 

 a slender account of the next generation, and in not many more, the 

 whole race would be extinct. Besides the great numbers of eggs and 

 young picked from the boughs by woodpeckers and other birds, they 

 are constantly infested by legions of ants before and after they are 

 hatched. Even the little red species, the most diminutive of the 

 race, will shoulder the eggs and the young, and bear them off to 

 their cells. In all our researches we found them in battalions, sys- 

 tematically arrayed for wholesale plunder and devastation. They 

 are probably the most numerous of all the insects on our globe, 

 and are found in all nations and all latitudes. 



The mode of subsistence in the earth, from the time the young 

 descends till it appears at the surface in the pupa state, does not 

 seem to have been conjectured. We have already suggested that 

 the young, when it falls to the ground, descends by the side of a 

 vegetable root. It seeks first a penetrable spot, and then the 

 fibrous roots of vegetables that insure its means of subsistence. It 

 moves along the particles of earth through those interstices that 

 are found in all soils, and furnish a passage to any necessary depth. 

 It does not dig a passage for which its tender limbs would be unfit, 

 and which is unnecessary from the constitution of the soil, if we 

 view it through a good glass. We find the particles loosely ag- 

 gregated, resembling heaps of stone, through which mice and rats 

 find their way with ease. The soil is more loosely connected by 

 the insertion of numerous small roots with which it is every where 

 intersected to a certain depth, and of which there are ten times as 

 many as could be seen by the naked eye. In all places they are 

 found attached to the tender fibrils of plants. When they are dis- 

 turbed or driven from them, they seek for others the moment they 

 are at liberty. This is their only aliment, not the substance of the 

 roots of plants, which they cannot divide and comminute without 

 teeth or jaws to use them, but the more aerial exhalation from their 

 surface. This well established fact would seem to account for the 

 slowness of their growth, and furnish a reason for so long a subter- 

 raneous residence. 



