ANT HILLS 



279 



The study of their various buildings alone, from the little we 

 know of them, would occupy a zealous entomologist for years. 

 Here we have an American species that forms its globular nest 

 of the size of a large Dutch cheese, of small twigs artistically 

 interlaced ; here another, which constructs its dwelling of dried 

 excrements, attaching it to a thick branch ; while a third {Foi^mica 

 bispinosa) uses the cotton of the Bombaceae for its building 

 material, and through the chemical agency of its pungent 

 secretion converts it into a spongy substance. 



On the west coast of Borneo, Mr. Adams noticed two kinds of 

 ants' nests — one species of the size of a man's hand, adhering to 

 the trunk of trees, resembling, when cut through, a section of the 

 lungs ; the other was composed of small withered bits of sticks 

 and leaves, heaped up in the axils of branches, somewhat in the 

 form of flattened cylinders and compressed cones. A third 

 species, still more ingenious, constructs its domicile out of a large 

 leaf, bending the two halves by the weight of united millions 

 till the opposite margins n»eet at the under surface of the mid-rib, 

 where they are secured by a gummy matter. The stores and 

 larvae are conveyed into the nest so made by regular beaten 

 tracks along the trunk and branches of the tree. 



On the large plains near Lake Dilolo, where wat^ stands so 

 long annually as to allow the lotus and other aqueous plants to 

 come to maturity, Dr. Livingstone had occasion to admire the 

 wonderful sagacity of the ants, whom he declares to be wiser 

 than some men, as they learn by experience. When all the ant 

 horizon is submerged a foot deep, they manage to exist by 

 ascending to little houses, built of black tenacious loam, on stalks 

 of grass, and placed higher than the line of inundation. This 

 must have been the result of experience, for if they had waited 

 till the water actually invaded their habitations on the ground, 

 they would not have been able to procure materials for their 

 higher quarters, unless they dived down to the bottom for every 

 mouthful of clay. Some of these upper chambers are about the 

 size of a bean, and others as large as a man's thumb. They 

 must have been built in anticipation, " and if so," says the cele- 

 brated traveller, " let us humbly hope that the sufferers by the 

 late inundations in France maybe possessed of as much common 

 sense as the little black ants of the Dilolo plains." 



Two species of continental Europe, the Formica rubesceTis and 



