TROPICAL NATURE 



of rare butterflies and other insects, I laid it down on the 

 bench by my side. On leaving the house I noticed some ants 

 on it, and on opening the box found only a mass of detached 

 wings and bodies, the latter in process of being devoured by 

 hundreds of fire-ants. 



The celebrated Sauba ant of America (CEcodoma cepha- 

 lotes) is allied to the preceding, but is even more destructive, 

 though it seems to confine itself to vegetable products. It 

 forms extensive underground galleries, and the earth brought 

 up is deposited on the surface, forming huge mounds some- 

 times thirty or forty yards in circumference and from one 

 to three feet high. On first seeing these vast deposits of 

 red or yellow earth in the woods near Para, it was hardly 

 possible to believe they were not the work of man, or at 

 least of some large burrowing animal. In these underground 

 caves the ants store up large quantities of leaves, which they 

 obtain from living trees. They gnaw out circular pieces and 

 carry them away along regular paths a few inches wide, 

 forming a stream of apparently animated leaves. The great 

 extent of the subterranean workings of these ants is no doubt 

 due in part to their permanence in one spot, so that when 

 portions of the galleries fall in or are otherwise rendered 

 useless, they are extended in another direction. When in 

 the island of Mara jo, near Para, I noticed a path along which 

 a stream of Saiibas were carrying leaves from a neighbouring 

 thicket; and a relation of the proprietor assured me that 

 he had known that identical path to be in constant use by 

 the ants for twenty years. Thus we can account for the 

 fact mentioned by Mr. Bates, that the underground galleries 

 were traced by smoke for a distance of seventy yards in the 

 Botanic Gardens at Para ; and for the still more extraordinary 

 fact related by the Eev. Hamlet Clark, that an allied species 

 in Eio de Janeiro has excavated a tunnel under the bed of 

 the river Parahyba, where it is about a quarter of a mile wide ! 

 These ants seem to prefer introduced to native trees ; and young 

 plantations of orange, coffee, or mango trees are sometimes 

 destroyed by them, so that where they abound cultivation of 

 any kind becomes almost impossible. Mr. Belt ingeniously 

 accounts for this preference by supposing that for ages there 

 has been a kind of struggle going on between the trees 



