About this time a most extraordinary change begins to take place in the queen, to which we know nothing similar, except in the pulex penetrans of Linnæus, the jigger of the West-Indies, and in the different species of coccus cochineal. The abdomen of this female begins gradually to extend and enlarge to such an enormous size, that an old queen will have it increased so as to be fifteen hundred or two thousand times the bulk of the rest of her body, and twenty or thirty thousand times the bulk of a labourer; the skin between the segments of the abdomen extends in every direction, and at last the segments are removed to half an inch distance from each other, though at first the length of the whole abdomen was not above half an inch. They preserve their dark-brown colour, and the upper part of the abdomen is marked with a regular series of brown bars, from the thorax to the posterior part of the abdomen, while the intervals between them are covered with a thin, delicate, transparent skin, and appear of a fine cream colour, a little shaded by the dark colour of the intestines and watery fluid seen here and there beneath. It is supposed that the animal is upwards of two years old when the abdomen is increased to three inches in length: they have sometimes been found of near twice that size. The abdomen is then of an irregular oblong shape, being contracted by the muscles of every segment, and is become one vast matrix full of eggs, which make long circumvolutions through an innumerable quantity of very minute vessels, that circulate round the inside in a serpentine manner, which would exercise the ingenuity of a skilful anatomist to dissect and develope. This singular matrix is not more remarkable for its amazing extension and size, than for its peristaltic motion, which resembles the undulation of waves, and continues incessantly without any apparent effort of the animal; so that one part or other is alternately rising and sinking in perpetual succession. The matrix seems never at rest, but to be always protruding eggs to the amount, in old queens, of sixty in a minute, or eighty thousand and upwards in one day of twenty-four hours. These eggs are instantly taken from her body by her attendants, and carried to the nurseries, which in a great nest may some of them be four or five feet distant in a straight line, and consequently much farther by their winding galleries. Here the young, when they are hatched, are attended and provided with every thing necessary, until they are able to shift for themselves, and take their share of the labours of the community.