“Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war.”

The workers appear to perform a never-ending round of duties.  They build the nests, make the roads, attend to the wants of the young, train up the latter in the ways of ant existence, wait on the sovereigns of the nest, and like diplomatic courtiers, duly arrange for the royal marriages of the future.  As Mr. Bates remarks, “The wonderful part in the history of the termites is, that not only is there a rigid division of labor, but nature has given to each class a structure of body adapting it to the kind of labor it has to perform.  The males and females form a class apart; they do no kind of work, but in the course of growth acquire wings to enable them to issue forth and disseminate their kind.  The workers and soldiers are wingless, and differ solely in the shape and armature of the head.  This member in the laborers is smooth and rounded, the mouth being adapted for the working of the materials in building the hive.  In the soldier the head is of very large size, and is provided in almost every kind with special organs of offence and defence in the form of horny processes resembling pikes, tridents, and so forth....  The course of human events in our day seems, unhappily, to make it more than ever necessary for the citizens of civilized and industrious communities to set apart a numerous armed class for the protection of the rest; in this, nations only do what nature has of old done for the termites.  The soldier termite, however, has not only the fighting instinct and function; he is constructed as a soldier, and carries his weapons not in his hand but growing out of his body.”  When a colony of termites is disturbed, the ordinary citizens disappear and the military are called out.  “The soldiers mounted the breach,” says Mr. Bates, “to cover the retreat of the workers,” when a hole was made in the archway of one of their covered roads, and with military precision the rearmen fall into the vacant places in the front ranks as the latter are emptied by the misfortune of war.

[Illustration:  FIG. 2.  THE QUEEN ANT; AND THE WORKERS CARRYING AWAY THE EGGS.]

In a termite colony there is but one king and queen, the royal couple being the true parents of the colony.  The state-apartments are situated in the centre of the hive, and are strictly guarded by workers.  Both king and queen are wingless, and are of larger size than their subjects.  The queen engages in a continual round of maternal duties, the eggs deposited by the sovereign-mother being at once seized by the workers and conveyed to special or “nursery cells,” where the young are duly tended and brought up.  Once a year, at the beginning of the rainy season, winged termites appear in the hive as developments of certain of the eggs laid by the queen-termite.  These latter are winged males and females (Fig. 1, 1), the two sexes being present in equal numbers.  Some of these, after shedding their wings, become