INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 207 



tended to see them burnt by bushels. — You may have ob- 

 served perhaps in some cabinets of foreign insects an ant, 

 the head of which is very large in proportion to the size 

 of its body, with a piece of leaf in its mouth many times 

 bigger than itself. These ants, called in Tobago parasol 

 ants (Formica cephalotes, L.), cut circular pieces out of the 

 leaves of various trees and plants, which they carry in their 

 jaws to their nests, and they will strip a tree of its leaves 

 in a night, a circumstance which has been confirmed to 

 me by Captain Hancock 3 . Stedman mentions another 

 very large ant, being at least an inch in length, which has 

 the same instinct. It was a pleasant spectacle, he observes, 

 to behold this army of ants inarching constantly in the 

 same direction, and each individual with its bit of green 

 leaf in its mouth b . The injury thus caused to trees by 

 insects is not confined to the mere loss of their leaves for 

 one season; for it occasions them to draw upon the funds 

 of another, by sending forth premature shoots and making 

 gems unfold, that, in the ordinary course, would not have 

 put forth their foliage till the following year. 



Other insects, though they do not entirely devour the 

 leaves of trees and plants, yet considerably diminish their 

 beauty. Thus, for instance, sometimes the subcutaneous 

 larvae undermine them, when the leaf exhibits the whole 

 course of their labyrinth in a pallid, tortuous, gradually 

 dilating line — at others the Tortrices disfigure them by 



a The same intelligent gentleman related to me, that a person hav- 

 ing taken some land at Bahia in the Brazils, he was compelled by 

 these ants, which were so numerous as to render every effort to de- 

 stroy them ineffectual, to relinquish the occupation of it. Their nests 

 were excavated to the astonishing depth of fourteen feet. Merian In- 

 sect. Sur. 18. Smeathman on Termites, Phil. Trans, lxxi. 39, note 35. 



b Stedman, ii. 142. 



