138 



CARIPI 



An owl in one of the Genipapa trees muttered now and 

 then a succession of syllables resembling the word ' Muru- 

 cututu *. Sometimes the croaking and hooting of frogs 

 and toads were so loud that we could not hear one another's 

 voices within doors. Swarms of dragon-flies appeared 

 in the daytime about the pools of water created by the 

 rain, and ants and termites came forth in the winged 

 state in vast numbers. I noticed that the winged ter- 

 mites, or white ants, which came by hundreds to the 

 lamps at night, when alighting on the table, often jerked 

 off their wings by a voluntary movement. On examina- 

 tion I found that the wings were not shed by the roots, 

 for a small portion of the stumps remained attached to 

 the thorax. The edge of the fracture was in all cases 

 straight, not ruptured : there is, in fact, a natural seam 

 crossing the member towards its root, and at this point 

 the long wing naturally drops or is jerked off when the 

 insect has no further use for it. The white ant is endowed 

 with wings simply for the purpose of flying away from 

 the colony peopled by its wingless companions, to pair 

 with individuals of the same or other colonies, and thus 

 propagate and disseminate its kind. The winged in- 

 dividuals are males and females, whilst the great bulk 

 of their wingless fraternity are of no sex, and are re- 

 stricted to the functions of building the nests, nursing 

 and defending the young brood. The two sexes mate 

 whilst on the ground after the wings are shed, and then 

 the married couples, if they escape the numerous enemies 

 which lie in wait for them, proceed to the task of founding 

 new colonies. Ants and white ants have much that is 

 analogous in their modes of life : they belong, however, 

 to two widely different orders of insects, strongly con- 

 trasted in their structure and manner of growth. In 

 some respects the termites are more wonderful than the 

 ants, but I shall reserve an account of them for another 

 chapter. 



I amassed at Caripi a very large collection of beautiful 

 and curious insects, amounting altogether to about twelve 

 hundred species. The number of Coleoptera was re- 

 markable, seeing that this order is so poorly represented 

 near Para. I attributed their abundance to the number 

 of new clearings made in the virgin forest by the native 

 settlers. The felled timber attracts lignivorous insects, 

 and these draw in their train the predacious species of 



