324 



LIFE, IN ITS HIGHER FORMS. 



silis) far exceed ours in ingenious adaptation for security 

 and defence. Pringle describes them as suspended, twenty 

 or more from a single tree, attached to the tips of those 

 twigs that hang over a precipice. The body of the nest is 

 spherical, and the entrance, which is always from below, is 

 through a cylindrical gallery of twelve or fifteen inches in 

 length, which projects from the body, exactly like the neck 

 of a chemist's retort. The whole fabric is most ingeniously 

 and elegantly woven of a species of very tough grass. The 

 object of the precaution displayed in the construction, and 

 in the position chosen, is evidently the protection of the 

 eggs and young from the baboons and monkeys that would 

 otherwise devour them.* 



We must reluctantly close our enumeration of singular 

 nests, with one, whose chief curiosity is the exhibition of 

 that social instinct, which, as in the bees, wasps, and ants, 

 among Insects, prompts each individual to work on a com- 

 mon plan for the general good. The Pensile Grosbeaks, 

 just described, associate in their domestic economy, but 

 there is no union of labour. Another bird of the same 

 family, and of the same country — the Sociable Grosbeak 

 (Loxia socio) of South Africa — builds in concert a huge 

 irregular sloping roof of thatch around the stem of a tall 

 tree, beneath the eaves of which each pair of birds builds 

 its own nest. So numerous are they, however, that the 

 nests are in contact with each other, and appear to form 

 but one structure, distiuguished only by the little aperture 

 of each. Le Vaillant describes one roof which he examined, 

 which contained beneath its eaves three hundred and 

 twenty inhabited cells. 



* Ephemeridea. 



