THE WHITE ANTS. 537 



the nature of the enemy, or the cause of the attack. lie then goes 

 into the hill, gives the alarm, and, in a short time, large bodies of 

 soldiers rush out as fast as the breach will permit. It is not easy to 

 describe the fury that actuates these fighting insects. In their eager- 

 ness to repel the enemy, they frequently tumble down the sides of the 

 hill, but quickly recover themselves, and bite every thing they 

 encounter. 



QUEEN WHITE ANT, WITH LABORERS CARRYING OFF HER EGGS. 



Allusion has already been made to instances in which female insects 

 are larger than males, but this is nothing compared with the prodigious 

 difference between the sexes of (Termas Fatale) and other species of 

 White Ants, whose males are often many times less than the females, 

 when the latter are distended with eggs. When the business of ovi^ 

 position commences, they take the eggs from the female and place them 

 in the nurseries prepared for their reception. Her abdomen now begins 

 gradually to extend, till, in process of time, it is enlarged to one thou- 

 sand five hundred or two thousand times the size of the rest of her body, 

 and her bulk equal to that of twenty or thirty thousand workers. 

 This part, often more than three inches in length, is now a mass of eggs, 

 making long circumvolutions through numberless slender serpentine 

 vessels, which, like the undulations of water, produce a perpetual rise 

 and fall over the whole surface of the abdomen, and occasion a constant 

 extrusion of the eggs. The laborers of the White Ants attend the 

 queen while she is laying, and that with the utmost care ; for, as she 

 cannot then move about, they are under the necessity of carrying off 

 the eggs, as they are laid, to the nurseries. The extraordinary labour 

 which this requires in the community may be understood, when, accord- 

 ing to Smeathman, she lays sixty eggs in a minute, which will amount 

 to 86,400 in a day, and 31,536,000 in a year. These insects have 

 generally been called "Ants," probably on account of the similarity of 



