Antennæ small, filiform, and about the length of the thorax. Head very large, flattish, but rounded at top, and of a dirty black. Eyes small, round, and placed at the back part of the head. {79}Thorax small and brown. Abdomen the same colour, and smaller than the head, with a small erected scale placed between it and the thorax. Legs red brown, having a long tibial spur in the four hinder legs. Drury referred this species to the Formica barbara of Linnæus, which is not only distinct in the colour of the head, which is red, but also in having two knots at the base of the abdomen, whence it belongs to the genus Myrmica. The reader will find some interesting general details relative to the habits of the exotic species of the family to which this insect belongs, in the following observations which were published in the preface to the third volume, in the former edition of this work. "The various species of _ants, cock-roaches, and other voracious vermin_, are so numerous as to be one of the greatest plagues the collector abroad has to encounter, insomuch that it is barely possible to preserve dried insects, and other animals, with the utmost care and the closest boxes, much less living ones, which require light and air: for as soon as caterpillars are brought out of the woods, and placed within doors, with an intention of breeding them, they seem to be, as in fact they are, out of the order of nature, and quickly fall victims to the rapacity of those agents whose province it is to remove animal or vegetable bodies, which having arisen to maturity, or lost the principles of life, are on their progress toward a slow dissolution, a state of useless inanimation or noxious putrescence. Indeed among these none are more useful in this point of view than the _ants_; but, considered as _noxious vermin_, and capable of destroying animals, or, in many instances, of preventing and frustrating human industry, we know perhaps of none more formidable. These insects, whether considered as the efficient servants of nature, keeping clean and wholesome the face of the creation, or as the ministers of Almighty Power preserving a due equality between animals and vegetables, perform, without exemption or reserve, his high behests. Like the angel of heaven, they walk steadily forward in the line ordained them, and spare neither magnitude nor beauty, neither the living nor the dead, but sweep away all kinds of animal substances with undeviating rigour and rapacious perseverance.