EXCAVATED ARCHITECTURE. 399 



about a foot deep by half an incb wide, and divided in its length 

 into separate cells about an inch in depth. 1 



Who has not heard or read of the rock-hewn temples of the 

 East ? of the far-famed cave of Elephanta, that masterpiece of 

 excavated architecture, with its pillars and pilasters, its statues, 

 its relievos of gigantic bulk, cut, all, out of the living stone 

 (when, who knows ?) by that dwarf in comparison to these 

 his works, that ephemera in comparison with their duration, 

 Man ? But there are insects of another sort who have been 

 working in ages as remote, and who work still, at excavated 

 structures, which, as measured with their own statures, are more 

 gigantic by a thousandfold than the sculptured Elephanta or the 

 erected Edfou. These also are " carpenters " carpenter ants, 

 their craft headed by the jetty emmet. 2 Their entire structures 

 are, of course, too bulky for transportation to this our museum 

 gallery; but here, in some several fragments, we may look 

 upon their " walls, their galleries separated by partitions with 

 oval apertures or door-ways, their pillars, arches, columns, and 

 arcades ;" all wrought with wondrous lightness and delicacy, 

 and all dyed of a dark, bordering on a blackish hue, how pro- 

 duced would seem uncertain, but peculiar to the excavations of 

 these jet-black labourers not the only ones which cut their 

 sculptured cities in the trunks of trees. 3 r>t ^ 



But these "carpenters" must no longer detain us, or we 

 shall want time to bestow a glance, even, upon their brother 

 '' Weavers." Upon the process of their manufacture we hardly 

 can, though many are here assembled and busy at their work. 

 We may look, however, at a few collected specimens of their 

 clever spinning, as exhibited in a variety of cocoons, from the 

 looms chiefly of "Moths as Operatives" in their caterpillar 

 estate. 



Here we have them from a veil of delicate net-work to a 

 covering thick and warm as cloth. 



1 See Vignette, and refer to description. 

 3 Formica fuliginosa. 



