THE WHITE ANTS. 



caterpillar or maggot of the palm-tree snout beetle, which, is 

 served up at all the luxurious tables of West Indian epicures, 

 particularly of the French, as the greatest dainty of the Western 

 World. 



14. Troops of workers, apparently deprived of their king and 

 queen, which are constantly prowling about, occasionally encounter 

 one of these pairs, to which they offer their homage, and seem to 

 elect them as the sovereigns of their community, or the parents of 

 the colony which they are about to establish. All the individuals 

 of such a swarm, who are not so fortunate as to become the objects 

 of such an election, eventually perish under the attacks of the 

 enemies above mentioned, and probably never survive the day 

 which follows the evening of their swarming. 



15. So soon as this election has been made, the workers begin 

 to enclose their new rulers in a small chamber of clay, suited to 

 their size, the entrances to which are only large enough to admit 

 themselves and the soldiers, but much too small for the royal pair 

 to pass through, so that their state of royalty is a state of confine- 

 ment, and so continues during the remainder of their lives. 



16. The impregnation of the female is supposed to take place 

 after this confinement, and she soon begins to furnish the infant 

 colony with new inhabitants. The care of feeding her and her 

 male companion devolves upon the workers, who supply them both 

 with every thing that they want. As she increases in dimensions, 

 they keep enlarging the cell in which she is detained. When the 

 business of oviposition commences, they take the eggs from the 

 female, and deposit them in the nurseries. Her] abdomen now 

 begins gradually to extend, till, in process of time, it is enlarged 

 to 1500 or 2000 times the size of the rest of her body, and her bulk 

 equals that of 20000 or 30000 workers. 



17. A drawing of the pregnant queen in her natural size is 

 given in fig. 9. 



Fig. 9. The Pregnant Queen. 



18. The abdomen, often more than three inches in length, is 

 now a vast matrix of eggs, which make long circumvolutions 

 through numberless slender serpentine vessels : it is also remark- 

 102 



