192 THE UNIVERSE. 



The name of joiners is given to those legions of insects 

 which, with their powerful mandibles, cut and divide wood, 

 either to nourish themselves with, or to construct little 

 rooms furnished with partitions, and destined to receive 

 their offspring. 



The jet ant (Formica fuliginosa), so wonderful as a 

 carver, belongs to the first section of these ingenious 

 joiners. It establishes itself in the holes of our aged trees. 

 There it excavates an elegant and complicated dwelling, 

 consisting of a certain number of stories one above the 

 other, the floors of which are but a little thicker than stout 

 paper, and support long vistas of tiny c lumns of polished 

 wood ; the whole forming a perfect palace, through which 

 an animated throng keeps moving about. Other kinds of 

 ants do not disdain to establish themselves in the large 

 timbers of our houses, the stability of which is sometimes 

 thus endangered. 



In the second category is found the larva of the goat- 

 moth, a night-moth which sometimes reaches a length of 

 four or five inches, and is thicker than the finger. It 

 gnaws the inside of great trees, and scoops out in their 

 trunks wide and long tortuous galleries, which sometimes 

 suffice to kill them. We see that it works all the more 

 zealously because its labor is to satisfy a want ; it lives on 

 wood. 



hundreds of times in presence of different persons without in the least destroying 

 the hinge. One of the most extraordinary spiders is that found by the Rev. 

 Revett Shepherd in the fen ditches of Norfolk, which forms a raft of weeds 

 about three inches in diameter, probably held together by silken cords, on which 

 it floats about for the purpose of seizing drowning insects. Kirby and Spence, 

 In trod. i. 425. TR. 



