HISTORY OR THE ROTIFERA, OR WHEEL ANIMALCULES. 475 
engineering skill, strong dams across rapid streams, and builds 
covered houses which contain dwelhng-rooms, sleeping-rooms, 
nurseries, and larders, communicating with one another, and 
covered by a common roof — must ever be surrounded by a 
halo of romantic interest, scarcely diminished by the slight 
pruning which the accuracy of modern research has inflicted 
upon older exaggerations. 
How marvellous are the instincts of the termites or white ants 
of the tropics, which, uniting in armies of myriads, build great 
stony structures of cement manufactured by themselves, in- 
cluding various chambers and galleries, carry arched tunnels 
under ground, make long covered ways, and throw light but 
substantial tubular bridges across hollows !* And how addi- 
tionally marvellous is the marshalled order in which these hosts 
are arranged ; not forming a promiscuous multitude, but divided 
into ranks, as strongly defined and as permanent as are the 
castes of India or Japan ; — the royal pair nourished with loving 
care, and housed in capacious domed apartments ; the soldiers 
ever ready for warlike attack or defence, but never making the 
slightest attempt to build or repair; the labouring’ millions 
unfit for battle, but ever ready with their assiduous skilled 
labour to erect or enlarge or repair the common edifice, or to 
collect food for the common sustenance ! 
Scarcely less curious, and more celebrated, are the social and 
architectural instincts of the hive-bees and the paper-making 
wasps. These, though they do not display the same elaborate- 
ness of class-division as the termites, yet have claims to 
admiration peculiarly their own, in the perfect mathematical 
regularity with which they form them dwellings, and the 
materials which they employ in the construction, — wax in the 
one case, paper in the other, each substance being collected in 
a crude state, and then elaborated by the insects themselves. 
In the woods of Southern Africa the traveller meets here and 
there with trees, the trunk and principal branches of which are 
inclosed in a vast dome of thatch, suggesting the thought that 
a large barn had once stood on the spot, but that a tree had 
grown from the area through the roof and lifted it from the 
walls, which had then fallen and disappeared. It is the resi- 
dence of a colony of birds, — the sociable grosbeak — which, five 
hundred to a thousand in number, build their nests in crowded 
proximity, and protect the whole with this well-compacted 
thatch of native grass. 
Yet another species of the same tribe of birds, — the pensile 
grosbeak, — inhabiting the same regions, associates in hke mul- 
titudes, but builds habitations of more elegance, which we may 
* Smeathman, passim. 
