282 
TROPICAL NATURE 
in 
of rare butterflies and other insects, I laid it down on the 
bench by my side. On leaving the house I noticed some ants 
on it, and on opening the box found only a mass of detached 
wings and bodies, the latter in process of being devoured by 
hundreds of fire-ants. 
The celebrated Sauba ant of America (CEcodoma cepha- 
lotes) is allied to the preceding, but is even more destructive, 
though it seems to confine itself to vegetable products. It 
forms extensive underground galleries, and the earth brought 
up is deposited on the surface, forming huge mounds some- 
times thirty or forty yards in circumference and from one 
to three feet high. On first seeing these vast deposits of 
red or yellow earth in the woods near Para, it was hardly 
possible to believe they were not the work of man, or at 
least of some large burrowing animal. In these underground 
caves the ants store up large quantities of leaves, which they 
obtain from living trees. They gnaw out circular pieces and 
carry them away along regular paths a few inches wide, 
forming a stream of apparently animated leaves. The great 
extent of the subterranean workings of these ants is no doubt 
due in part to their permanence in one spot, so that when 
portions of the galleries fall in or are otherwise rendered 
useless, they are extended in another direction. When in 
the island of Mara jo, near Para, I noticed a path along which 
a stream of Saiibas were carrying leaves from a neighbouring 
thicket; and a relation of the proprietor assured me that 
he had known that identical path to be in constant use by 
the ants for twenty years. Thus we can account for the 
fact mentioned by Mr. Bates, that the underground galleries 
were traced by smoke for a distance of seventy yards in the 
Botanic Gardens at Para ; and for the still more extraordinary 
fact related by the Rev. Hamlet Clark, that an allied species 
in Rio de Janeiro has excavated a tunnel under the bed of 
the river Parahyba, where it is about a quarter of a mile wide ! 
These ants seem to prefer introduced to native trees ; and young 
plantations of orange, coffee, or mango trees are sometimes 
destroyed by them, so that where they abound cultivation of 
any kind becomes almost impossible. Mr. Belt ingeniously 
accounts for this preference by supposing that for ages there 
has been a kind of struggle going on between the trees 
