208 
STRANGE DWELLINGS. 
insect, and is allied to the dragon-flies, the ant-lions, the May- 
flies, and the beautiful Lace-wing flies. 
The Termites are social, and, like other social insects, are 
divided into several grades, such as workers, males, and females, 
the two latter of which are winged when they reach maturity. 
The body is oblong and flat, the antennae short, and the 
mandibles flattened and toothed, and in most cases extremely 
long and formidable. Each colony is founded by a single pair, 
popularly called the king and queen, the rest of the population 
consisting of developed males and females, which are intended 
to perpetuate the species and found fresh colonies, and of un- 
developed individuals, or neuters, of both sexes. The neuter 
males are termed soldiers, and are armed with powerful jaws 
proceeding from enormous heads, and the neuter females are 
termed workers, and are very small. 
There are now before me some specimens of African Termites, 
the soldiers of which are five or six times as large as the 
workers. They are formidable creatures, but they can do little 
harm beyond inflicting a severe bite, as they are not furnished 
with stings nor even with poison glands. They can bite through 
the clothes of an European, and when they swarm upon the 
bare limbs of the negro, they inflict almost unbearable tortures. 
The chief duty of the soldier seems to be the defence of the 
nest ; for whenever the walls are broken down the soldiers come 
trooping out to attack the invader, and being quite unconscious 
of fear, they will seize on the first strange object that happens 
to come in their way. There are comparatively few soldiers, 
their proportion to the workers being only one per cent. 
When a pair of developed Termites have settled themselves to 
form a colony, they share the fate of certain Oriental potentates, 
and never move out of their royal cell. When the queen is 
fairly settled, she increases in size so rapidly, that, even if she 
were set at liberty, she could not crawl an inch. While the 
head, thorax, and legs retain their original dimensions, the abdo- 
men swells until it is more than two inches long and about three 
quarters of an inch in width. Thus developed, she produces 
eggs by the thousand, which are immediately carried off by the 
