THE WHITE ANT : A THEORY. 



74i 



But what has this to do with earth or with agriculture ? The most 

 important point in the work of the white ant remains to be noted. 

 I have already said that the white ant is never seen. Why he should 

 have such a repugnance to being looked at is at first sight a mystery, 

 seeing that he himself is stone-blind. But his coyness is really due to 

 the desire for self -protection, for the moment his juicy body shows itself 

 above-ground there are a dozen enemies waiting to devour it. And 

 yet the white ant can never procure any food until it comes above- 

 ground. Nor will it meet the case for the insect to come to the sur- 

 face under the shadow of night. Night in the tropics, so far as ani- 

 mal life is concerned, is as the day. It is the great feeding-time, the 

 great fighting-time, the carnival of the carnivores, and of all beasts, 

 birds, and insects of prey from the least to the greatest. It is clear, 

 then, that darkness is no protection to the white ant ; and yet without 

 coming out of the ground it can not live. How does it solve the diffi- 

 culty ? It takes the ground out along with it. I have seen white ants 

 working on the top of a high tree, and yet they were underground. 

 They took up some of the ground with them to the tree-top ; just as 

 the Esquimaux heap up snow, building it into the low tunnel huts in 

 which they live, so the white ants collect earth, only in this case not 









'ALL SORTS OP FANTASTIC SHAPES 



from the surface but from some depth underneath the ground, and 

 plaster it into tunneled ways. Occasionally these run along the 

 ground, but more often mount in endless ramifications to the top of 

 trees, meandering along every branch and twig, and here and there 

 debouching into large covered chambers which occupy half the girth 

 of the trunk. Millions of trees in some districts are thus fantastically 

 plastered over with tubes, galleries, and chambers of earth, and many 



