Page:The naturalist on the River Amazons 1863 v2.djvu/77

 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 labourers is smooth and rounded, the mouth being adapted for the working of the materials in building the hive; in the soldiers the head is of very large size, and is provided in almost every kind with special organs of offence or defence in the form of horny processes resembling pikes, tridents, and so forth. Some species do not possess these extraordinary projections, but have, in compensation, greatly lengthened jaws, which are shaped in some kinds as sickles, in others as sabres and saws.

The course of human events in our day seems, unhappily, to make it more than ever necessary for the citizens of civilised 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 Termes, 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.

Whenever a colony of Termites is disturbed, the workers are at first the only members of the community seen; these quickly disappear through the endless ramified galleries of which a Termitarium is composed, and soldiers make their appearance. The observations of Smeathman on the soldiers of a species inhabiting tropical Africa are often quoted in books on Natural History, and give a very good idea of their habits. I was always amused at the pugnacity dis-