366 NOTES OF A BOTANIST 
and whose sole food was this Solanum. Their 
feeding-times were the dusk of evening and morn- 
ing, when they would arise, as it were, out of the 
earth, hover over the plants like a swarm of bees, 
and then settle down in such numbers that the 
plants were black with them. 
For myself, I am free to confess that I, too, 
generally looked on the insect world as enemies to 
be avoided or destroyed. Mosquitoes and ticks 
sucked my blood ; cockroaches ate and defiled my 
provisions ; caterpillars mutilated the plants when 
growing ; and ants made their nests among the 
dried specimens and saturated them with formic 
acid, or even cut them up and carried them away 
bodily. I recollect my horror at coming home and 
finding my house invaded by an army of Arriero 
or Saiiba ants who had fallen on a pile of dried 
specimens and were cutting them up most scientific- 
ally into circular disks whose radius was just equal 
to the artist's own longest diameter. The few notes 
on insects scattered through my journals relate, 
indeed, chiefly to ants, who deserve to be considered 
the actual owners of the Amazon valley far more 
than either the red or the white man. In fine, when 
I venture to offer these imperfect jottings to the 
notice of zoologists, I feel that I can at best be con- 
sidered only an interloper in a province not my own. 
Some Cases of Insect Migration 
Having above indicated the kinds of plants 
apparently most in request with the larvae of the 
Lepidoptera, I wish now to recall the attention of 
