INSECTS IN GENERAL. 115 



and sometimes one of sufficient length. But when these 

 animals are assembled in the same place in large bodies, 

 when they form, like the termites and ants, innumerable 

 legions, soon, in spite of their littleness, they will devour and 

 cause to disappear all the organized bodies which they find 

 deprived of life. The end of the Author of Nature in esta- 

 blishing such societies of insects, appears to have been to 

 augment the energy of this active and re-active force, which 

 maintains equilibrium among beings, and which, by continual 

 creations and destructions, perpetually regenerates organized 

 matter on the surface of our globe. If the regions neigh- 

 bouring to the equator develope more numerous productions, 

 the number of destructive agents, by a just compensation, is 

 also much more considerable there. Millions of ants and 

 termites work incessantly, in purging the surface of the soil 

 from carcasses by which the air would be speedily corrupted, 

 and so great are their voracity and thei.' numbers, that often 

 in a single day, these armies of insect- vultures devour the 

 flesh of a colossal quadruped. In their turn they become 

 the food of an infinity of birds, reptiles, quadrupeds, not to 

 mention the enemies opposed to them, by the class of animals 

 to which they themselves belong. 



The females of the social insects are distinguished by their 

 prodigious fecundity. Reaumer estimates at twelve millions, 

 the number of eggs laid by the domestic bee in spring, within 

 the space of twenty days. But this fecundity is much in- 

 ferior to that of the termites of the same sex. At the time 

 of laying, their belly is so distended by the number of eggs 

 with which it is filled, that this part is then, according to 

 Smeathman, five hundred or two thousand times more bulky 

 than the rest of the body. Its volume is twenty or thirty 

 thousand times larger than that of the belly of the neuter. 

 In fine, the number of eggs which the fem.ale can lay in the 

 space of one day, amounts to eighty thousand. Now, this 



I 2 



