chance they first threatened to bite one another, and then ran off in opposite directions. This was because they were of the same sex. Had they been of opposite ones, an attachment, under such circumstances, would no doubt have been formed between them.”[9] This is all the space which I can afford to these interesting insects. There are many other points in connection with them which I might have touched upon, but I thought it better to say less about what may be read by anyone in a score or so of works, and select as my text-book a series of the closest and most interesting observations, which lie buried in the pages of a scientific journal not at all likely to meet the public eye. Where possible, I shall be guided by the same or a similar principle throughout this small work. ----- Footnote 7: Nature, March 23rd, 1893. Footnote 8: The Cambridge Natural History, vol. 6, p. 134. Footnote 9: Quarterly Journal of Microscopic Science, vols. 39 and 40. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER III Ants and white ants—Guest insects—Ants’-nest beetles—Doubtful relations—A strange forbearance—Yellow ants and white wood-lice—Beetles fed by ants. FROM what has been said about the Termites in the last chapter, it is clear that they very much resemble ants in their habits, so that it is no wonder that they have long passed for ants in popular estimation. Such a similarity is quite enough to justify one part of the name, as names go; and as for the word white, which entomologists are always complaining about, that is quite near enough too, for though their bodies are not white, but yellow, yet the greater part of them—the soft fat abdomen, which particularly catches the eye—is of such a light yellow that it suggests white in contrast to the darker colouring of most ants. Scientific men—unless their particular science is philology—are dreadful pedants in regard to names, and always want to substitute their own manufactured ones, which have no real life in them, for what has sprung up naturally on the lips of the people. Thus, instead of hedge-sparrow—a name that explains itself to anyone who has seen the bird and knows something of its ways—ornithologists would have us say “hedge-accentor”—a preposterous concoction—and stormy petrel should, according to them, be “storm-petrel,” because the bird itself cannot be stormy, whatever the sea may be. No imagination behind the common use of language, then. No poetic transference of attributes. All is to be as prosy as professors can make it, and “we must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.” But names, which are a part of language, come into being as language itself does—spontaneously, that is to say, and by a natural growth. They are right because they exist; and the very errors contained in them—telling, as they do, of popular beliefs and superstitions—are of greater and wider interest than the