Let us now look at the beginning. _Solenopsis fugax_, Sir John Lubbock tells us, “makes its chambers and galleries in the walls of the nests of larger species, and is the bitter enemy of its hosts. The latter cannot get at them because they are too large to enter the galleries. The little _Solenopses_, therefore, are quite safe, and, as it appears, make incursions into the nurseries of the larger ant and carry off the larvæ as food. It is as if we had small dwarfs about eighteen inches to two feet long harbouring in the walls of our houses and every now and then carrying off some of our children into their horrid dens.”[58] This is the general proposition. Monsieur Janet can add a few particulars. “The _Solenopsis_,” he says, “may establish itself near almost any other ants of our country, and is found especially with....” Here follows a list all in Latin, but our common Wood-ant—the large one that makes those great heaps of pine-needles—and the Amazon, or slave-making ant, are contained in it.[59] “The _Solenopsis_ nest,” continues M. Janet, “may partially surround that of its neighbour’s, or it may even be partly excavated in the masses of earth which separate the galleries of the latter. In each case—and probably, too, when, as is frequent, there is not such close contiguity—fine connecting galleries enable the _Solenopsis_ to make incursions into the nests of their neighbours, where, as we shall see, they find an abundance of food. The actual nest consists of a number of small circular chambers about 8-20 mm. in diameter and only 6-8 mm. in height. Most of these chambers are separated from one another by several centimetres, and are connected by slender galleries, often less than two millimetres in diameter, entering the chambers at their walls, ceilings, or floors, which latter are remarkably clean, smooth, and hard.”[59]