Our diligent little exemplars, the ants, are equally careful about their eggs. So soon as they are produced, the ants catch them up and convey them to a separate chamber, moistening them with their tongues, and incessantly turning them backwards and forwards. They are the objects of constant solicitude until they are hatched; they are carried hither and thither according as the temperature of the nest varies. On a sunny morning they are brought out and laid to bask in the warm air; but if the sky becomes overcast, and heavy clouds threaten rain, the careful nurses whip up the eggs and hasten with them down to the deepest recesses of the nest. They even appear to imitate the brooding of the hen, and sit upon the eggs to impart to them some of the warmth of their own bodies. Before concluding this chapter, and entering upon the more striking manifestation of life in the form of the insect which will next come under our observation, it will be useful just to allude to the comparative number of eggs which some insects produce, which we shall place in the form of a table:-- The Noon-day Fly 2 The Flea 12 May Flies 100 Silk-worm Moth 500 Other Moths 1000 to 1600 Wasps 40,000 Bees 50,000 The most enormous number of all is produced by the queen of the white warrior ants. She deposits sixty eggs every minute, which is at the rate of 31,557,600 eggs in the course of a year, if we allow that she goes on laying at the same rate constantly, which is, perhaps, scarcely correct. Were all the eggs produced by insects to be hatched and to bring forth living progeny, we may well ask what would become of mankind? Unquestionably in a short time their numbers would multiply so excessively as to sweep every green thing off the face of the earth, and man and beast would experience all the horrors of famine. But they are the sport of a thousand accidents, which destroy them and keep down the threatened excess of population in this world of busy creatures. And when the young larva has been put forth, this check upon their tendency to over multiplication is still more prominently displayed, as we may presently have occasion to remark. [Illustration: FEROCIOUS LARVÆ OF DRAGON-FLY. Page 120.] PART II.--THE LARVA. CHAPTER I. THE YOUNG LARVA.