1936] 
Book Review 
27 
BOOK REVIEW. 
Our Enemy the Termite, By Thomas Elliot Snyder. 
Comstock Publishing” Company, Ithaca, New York, pp. xii 196, 57 
illustrations. 
In this book Dr. Snyder, senior entomologist of the Bureau 
of Entomology and Plant Quarantine of the United States 
Department of Agriculture and one of the earliest members 
of our increasing band of termitologists,has given us a suc- 
cinct and authoritative account, with abundant illustrations, 
of the caste system, feeding and nesting behavior, guests, 
parasites and fossil record of termites in general and of the 
more important of the nearly 60 North American species in 
particular, with detailed suggestions concerning the best 
methods, based on much observation and experimentation 
by the Department of Agriculture, of controlling their dep- 
redations. Owing to its brevity the account will probably 
find many readers who lack the time or inclination to peruse 
the larger volumes of Hegh and of the California students 
of termites (“Termites and Termite Control by Kofoid, 
Light and Others, 2nd edit. University of California Press). 
Dr. Snyder maintains with Imms and some other authors 
that the termite castes have a genetic and not a trophic 
origin, and agrees with Emerson that the worker caste is 
phylogenetically derived from the soldier. The student of 
other social insects will not fail to find in the first and second 
chapters of the book many interesting statements such as the 
one on page 5, that “termite queens in artificial colonies are 
known to have lived for twenty-five years,” which is longer 
than the longest record (17 years) for ant queens, and the 
statement that termite eggs secrete exudates, one that 
may also be true of ant eggs, though not hitherto advanced 
by myrmecologists. Several of the illustrations are very 
striking, such as those of the similar egg-masses of the sub- 
social cockroach, Cryptocercus punctulatus and the most 
