^ob STRANGE DWELLINGS. 



insect, and is allied to the dragon-flies, the ant-lions, the May- 

 flies, and the beautiful Lace-wing flies. 



The Termites are social, and, like other social insects, are 

 divided into several grades, such as workers, males, and females, 

 the two latter of which are winged when they reach maturity. 

 The body is oblong and flat, the antennae short, and the 

 mandibles flattened and toothed, and in most cases extremely 

 long and formidable. Each colony is founded by a single pair, 

 popularly called the king and queen, the rest of the population 

 consisting of developed males and females, which are intended 

 to perpetuate the species and found fresh colonies, and of un- 

 developed individuals, or neuters, of both sexes. The neuter 

 males are termed soldiers, and are armed with powerful jaws 

 proceeding from enormous heads, and the neuter females are 

 termed workers, and are very small. 



There are now before me some specimens of African Termites, 

 the soldiers of which are five or six times as large as the 

 workers. They are formidable creatures, but they can do little 

 harm beyond inflicting a severe bite, as they are not furnished 

 widi stings nor even with poison glands. They can bite through 

 the clothes of an European, and when they swarm upon the 

 bare limbs of the negro, they inflict almost unbearable tortures. 

 The chief duty of the soldier seems to be the defence of the 

 nest ] for whenever the walls are broken down the soldiers come 

 trooping out to attack the invader, and being quite unconscious 

 of fear, they will seize on the first strange object that happens 

 to come in their way. There are comparatively few soldiers, 

 their proportion to the workers being only one per cent. 



When a pair of developed Termites have settled themselves to 

 form a colony, they share the fate of certain Oriental potentates, 

 and never move out of their royal cell. When the queen is 

 fairly settled, she increases in size so rapidly, that, even if she 

 were set at liberty, she could not crawl an inch. While the 

 head, thorax, and legs retain their original dimensions, the abdo- 

 men swells until it is more than two inches long and about three 

 quarters of an inch in width. Thus developed, she produces 

 eggs by the thousand, which are immediately carried off by the 



