spumaria; seven or eight individuals of which distil several pints of water every night.—­P. 414.  It is highly probable that the termites are endowed with some such faculty:  nor is it more remarkable that an insect should combine the gases of its food to produce water, than that a fish should decompose water in order to provide itself with gas.  FOURCROIX found the contents of the air-bladder in a carp to be pure nitrogen.—­Yarrell, vol. i. p. 42.  And the aquatic larva of the dragon-fly extracts air for its respiration from the water in which it is submerged.  A similar mystery pervades the inquiry whence plants under peculiar circumstances derive the water essential to vegetation.]

[Footnote 2:  KNOX’S Ceylon, Part I, ch. vi. p. 24.]

[Footnote 3:  Dr. HOOKER, in his Himalayan Journal (vol. i. p. 20) is of opinion that the nests of the termites are not independent structures, but that their nucleus is “the debris of clumps of bamboos or the trunks of large trees which these insects have destroyed.”  He supposes that the dead tree falls leaving the stump coated with sand, which the action of the weather soon fashions info a cone.  But independently of the fact that the “action of the weather” produces little or no effect on the closely cemented clay of the white ants’ nest, they may be daily seen constructing their edifices in the very form of a cone, which they ever after retain.  Besides which, they appear in the midst of terraces and fields where no trees are to be seen; and Dr. Hooker seems to overlook the fact that the termites rarely attack a living tree; and although their nests may be built against one, it continues to flourish not the less for their presence.]

In their earlier stages the termites proceed with such energetic rapidity, that I have seen a pinnacle of moist clay, six inches in height and twice as large in diameter, constructed underneath a table between sitting down to dinner and the removal of the cloth.

As these lofty mounds of earth have all been carried up from beneath the surface, a cave of corresponding dimensions is necessarily scooped out below, and here, under the multitude of cupolas and pinnacles which canopy it above, the termites hollow out the royal chamber for their queen, with spacious nurseries surrounding it on all sides.  Store-rooms and magazines occupy the lower apartments, and all are connected by arched galleries, long passages, and doorways of the most intricate and elaborate construction.  In the centre and underneath the spacious dome is the recess for the queen—­a hideous creature, with the head and thorax of an ordinary termite, but a body swollen to a hundred times its usual and proportionate bulk, and presenting the appearance of a mass of shapeless pulp.  From this great progenitrix proceed the myriads which people the subterranean hive, consisting, like the communities of the genuine ants, of labourers and soldiers, which are destined never to acquire