406 HABITATIONS OF INSECTS. 



ruJ?its outward appearance, and the articles of which it con- 

 sists, interiorly it presents an arrangement admirably calculated 

 at once for protection against the excessive heat of the sun, 

 and yet to retain a due degree of genial warmth. It is wholly 

 composed of numerous small apartments of different sizes, 

 communicating with each other by means of galleries and ar- 

 ranged in separate stories, some very deep in the earth, others 

 a considerable height above it : the former for the reception of 

 the young in cold weather and at night, the latter adapted to 

 their use in the daytime. In forming these, the ants mix the 

 earth excavated from the bottom of the nest with the other 

 materials of which the mount consists, and thus give solidity 

 to the whole. Besides the avenues which join the apartments 

 together, other galleries varying in dimensions communicate 

 with the outside of the nest at the top of th^ mount. These 

 open doors would seem ill-calculated for precluding the ad- 

 mission of wet or of nocturnal enemies : but the ants alter 

 their dimensions continually according to circumstances ; and 

 they wholly close them at night, when all gradually retire to 

 the interior, and a few sentinels only are left to guard the 

 gates. On rainy days, too, they keep them shut, and when 

 the sky is cloudy open them partially.^ 



The habitations of these ants are much larger than those of 

 any other species in this country, and sometimes as big as a 

 small haycock ; but they are mere molehills when compared 

 with the enormous mounds which other species, apparently of 

 the same family, but much larger, construct in warmer cli- 

 mates. Malouet states, that in the forests of Guiana, he 

 once saw ant-hills which, though his companion would not 

 suffer him to approach nearer than forty paces for fear of his 

 being devoured, seemed to him to be fifteen or twenty feet 

 high, and thirty or forty in diameter at the base, assuming 

 the form of a pyramid, truncated at one third of its height ^ ; 

 and Stedman, when in Surinam, once passed ant-hills six feet 

 high, and at least one hundred feet in circumference.^ In 

 the plains of Paraguay, where the ants commit great devast- 

 ations, a species described by Dobrizhoffer forms conical 



1 Huber, Recherches sur les Mceurs des Fourmis, pp. 21 — 29. 



2 Ibid. p. 168. 3 Stedman's Surinam, i. 169. 



