486 Miscellaneous, 
well-developed nest; but the female, which is popularly known as 
the “‘ queen white ant,” as soon as she is settled in her cell, often 
called the “‘ royal chamber,” begins to lay eggs, and while the head 
and thorax remain at the normal size, her abdomen swells out into 
a cylindrical rounded white mass as thick as a small pea-pod, which 
renders her quite helpless and incapable of crawling about. The 
body now consists of a great number of egg-tubes or ovaries, leading 
into the egg-laying duct, and from this single insect flows the whole 
life and reproductive power of the colony. The queen is carefully 
fed and looked after by the workers, who remove the eggs into 
adjoining galleries between her cell and the true nursery previously 
described. ‘The queen may lay eggs for some years, but I do not 
think either at the rapid rate or for so long as many of our popular 
writers have asserted, for the workers have the power (probably in 
the method of feeding the young larvee) of producing supplementary 
queens, which never pass through the winged form, but are produced 
direct from the egg, and probably supersede the queen in cases of 
emergency, when she has outlived her usefulness or been accident- 
ally destroyed. 
The workers, which constitute the bulk of the members of every 
nest, are aborted females and males (and not only females, as 
among the bees), whose duties are to do all the building and 
repairing of the nests, look after the queen, eggs, and larve, and all 
other work in the community; and itis to the powerful jaws of this 
form that we are indebted for their destructive habits. They 
measure about 2 lines in length, of a uniform dull white colour, 
with large rounded heads sometimes tinted with pale yellow; the 
antennw formed of a number of rounded bead-shaped segments and 
a rounded upper lip which covers the short powerful jaws; the 
thorax is comparatively small; the legs short and stout, armed 
with fine spines at the base of the shanks; and the abdomen large 
and rounded. 
The soldiers are also aborted males and females, and are never as 
numerous as the workers. Their duties are to protect the nest and 
drive off any enemies that appear when it is damaged or broken 
into, and direct the labours of the workers when adding to or 
mending gaps in the outer surface of the nest. 
They are more slender in form than the workers, with the head 
pear-shaped and the jaws produced into two stout scissor-like jaws, 
while above them in the centre of the head is a small cylindrical 
opening connected with a chamber at the base of the head, through 
which they can eject the white fluid previously mentioned, which is 
also a weapon of defence against their enemies. 
In these remarkable households it is the blind leading the blind, 
for neither the soldiers or workers are furnished with eyes, and all 
their movements must be directed by their delicate sense of touch, 
for when mending a gap in the nest the soldiers always form them- 
selves into a regular row, standing just far enough apart for them 
to touch the tip of each other’s antenne, which are constantly 
