Note 7 — CHAP. II. OF THE EGGS, LARVÆ, AND PUPÆ OF ANTS.

Among the spinning larvæ, there are some whose web is marked with a black point at one of the extremities, which has been taken for the remains of the skin of the pupæ, which they reject in their preceding state; but as I have found the cocoons, thus stained, before the larvæ they contained had undergone their metamorphosis, this supposition falls to the ground. I am fully convinced it is nothing more than the residue of the aliment, which these insects discharge a little time before their change.—A.

Gould is of our Author’s opinion; but Sir Edward King, who published a memoir on ants in an early number of the Philosophical Transactions conjectures, that it is a secretion cast out by the larva in its transformation.—T.