

408 THE INSECT WORLD. 
inch long, the body soft, and of an extreme delicacy, but the sharp 
mandibles capable of attacking the hardest bodies. The soldiers 
are twice as long, and weigh as much as fifteen workers, and may 
be distinguished by their enormous horned head, armed with sharp 
pincers. The male weighs as much as thirty workers, and attains 
to a length of nearly four-fifths of an inch. 
But the pregnant female leaves all these dimensions far behind. 
Her abdomen becomes two thousand times as big as the rest 
of her body! She then attains to six inches in length, and weighs 
as much as thirty thousand workers. By a hideous contrast, the 
head alone does not increase in size. D DD D (Fig. 381) is an 
exact representation of this monster. She is always motionless 
and captive in her cell, entirely occupied in laying. Her fecundity 
surpasses all bounds: sixty eggs a minute, more than eighty 
thousand a day. Smeathman is inclined to think that this pro- 
digious laying goes on during the whole of the year. ‘ This soft, 
whitish beast,’ says M. Michelet, “a belly rather than a being, is 
as large at least as one’s thumb; a traveller professes to have seen 
one of the size of a crawfish. The larger she is, the more fruitful, 
the more inexhaustible, this terrible insect-mother seems to be 
the more adored by the fanatical rabble.’ She seems to be their 
beau-ideal, their poetry, their enthusiasm. If you carry away with 
any rubbish a portion of their city, you see them instantly set to 
work at the breach to build an arch which may protect the vene- 
rated head of the mother, to reconstruct her royal cell, which will 
become (if there are sufficient materials) the centre, the base, of 
the restored city. I am not astonished, though, at the excessive 
love which this people show for this instrument of fecundity. If 
all other species did not combine to destroy them, this truly pro- 
digious mother would make them masters of the world, and—what 
shall I say ?—its only inhabitants. The fish alone would be left ; 
but insects would perish. It suffices to be remembered that 
the mother-bee does not produce in a year what the female 
white ant can produce ina day. By her they would be enabled to 
devour everything; but they are weak and tasty, and so every- 
thing devours them.’’* In fact, birds are very greedy after ter- 
mites ; poultry destroy immense quantities of them. Ants give 
* J. Michelet, ‘‘ L’Insecte,”’ p. 328. 

