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366
NOTES OF A BOTANIST
and whose sole food was this Solanum. Their
feeding-times were the dusk of evening and morn-
ing, when they would arise, as it were, out of the
earth, hover over the plants like a swarm of bees,
and then settle down in such numbers that the
plants were black with them.
For myself, I am free to confess that I, too,
generally
looked on the insect world as enemies to
be avoided or destroyed. Mosquitoes and ticks
sucked my blood ; cockroaches ate and defiled my
provisions ; caterpillars mutilated the plants when
growing ;
and
ants made their nests among the
dried specimens and saturated them with formic
acid, or even cut them up and carried them away
bodily. I recollect my horror at coming
home and
finding my house invaded by an army of Arriero
or Saiiba ants who had fallen on a pile of dried
specimens and were cutting them up most scientific-
ally into circular disks whose radius was just equal
to the artist's own longest diameter. The few notes
on insects scattered through my journals relate,
indeed, chiefly to ants, who deserve to be considered
the actual owners of the Amazon valley far more
than either the red or the white man. In fine, when
I venture to offer these imperfect jottings to the
notice of zoologists, I feel that I can at best be con-
sidered only an interloper in a province not my own.
SOME CASES OF INSECT MIGRATION
Having above indicated the kinds of plants
apparently most in request with the larvae of the
Lepidoptera,
I wish now to recall the attention of