Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/355

Rh is made of leaves, cut and masticated until they become a coarse pulp. Its diameter is about six inches; it is suspended among thickest foliage, and sustained not only by the branches on which it hangs, but by the leaves, which are worked into the composition, and in many parts project from its outer wall. It may be at once distinguished from the nest of Crematogaster by its smoothness and regularity of surface. A species of this genus was discovered in Africa by Foxcroft, who observed that whenever the ants were molested, they rushed out of their house



in such numbers that their pattering upon the papery covering deluded him into thinking rain was falling on the leaves above.

In the forests of Cayenne, the nests of Formica bispinosa are remarkably like a sponge or an overgrown fungus. The down or cottony matter enveloping the seeds in the pods of the Bombax ceiba is used for their construction, vegetable fibers that are too short to convert into fabrics, but which the ants contrive to felt and weave into a compact and uniform mass, so dexterously that all trace of the individuality of the threads is lost. The material much resembles amadou, and like that substance is valuable for stopping violent discharges of blood. In size the nests generally have a diameter of eight or nine inches. The ant itself is little and dark, and noted for two long, sharp spines on its thorax, one on either side; hence its scientific name of bispinosa, from the Latin, meaning two-spined. Popularly it has been called the fungus ant.