748 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tion, passing onward for delivery to tbe workers who are waiting to 

 carry them to the nurseries where they are hatched. Assiduous atten- 

 tion meantime is paid to the queen by other workers, who feed her 

 diligently, with much self-denial stuffing her with morsel after morsel 

 from their own jaws. A guard of honor in the shape of a 

 few of the larger soldier-ants is also in attendance as a last 

 and almost unnecessary precaution. In addition, finally, 

 to the soldiers, workers, and queen, the royal chamber has 

 also one other inmate the king. He is a very ordinary - 

 ^Vhite"an NG ^ 00 ^ m g insect (Fig. 9), about the same size as the soldiers, 

 but the arrangement of the parts of the head and body 

 is widely different, and like the queen he is furnished with eyes. 



Let me now attempt to show the way in which the work of the 

 termites bears upon the natural agriculture and geology of the trop- 

 ics. Looking at the question from the large point of view, the gen- 

 eral fact to be noted is, that the soil of the tropics is in a state of per- 

 petual motion. Instead of an upper crust, moistened to a paste by 

 the autumn rains, and then baked hard as adamant in the sun, and an 

 under soil, hermetically sealed from the air and light, and inaccessible 

 to all the natural manures derived from the decomposition of organic 

 matters these two layers being eternally fixed in their relation to one 

 another we have a slow and continued transference of the layers al- 

 ways taking place. Not only to cover their depredations, but to dis- 

 pose of the earth excavated from the underground galleries, the ter- 

 mites are constantly transporting the deeper and exhausted soils to the 

 surface. Thus there is, so to speak, a constant circulation of earth in 

 the tropics, a plowing and harrowing, not furrow by furrow and clod 

 by clod, but pellet by pellet and grain by grain. 



Some idea of the extent to which the underlying earth of the tropi- 

 cal forests is thus brought to the surface will have been gathered from 

 the facts already described ; but no one who has not seen it with his 

 own eyes can appreciate the gigantic magnitude of the process. Oc- 

 casionally one sees a whole trunk or branch, and sometimes almost an 

 entire tree, so swathed in red mud that the bark is almost completely 

 concealed, the tree looking as if it had been taken out bodily and 

 dipped in some crystallizing solution. It is not. only one tree here and 

 there that exhibits the work of the white ant, but in many places the 

 whole forest is so colored with dull-red tunnels and patches as to give 

 a distinct tone to the landscape an effect which, at a little distance, 

 reminds one of the abend-roth in a pine-forest among the Alps. Some 

 regions are naturally more favorable than others to the operations of 

 the termites, and to those who have only seen them at work in India 

 or in the lower districts of Africa this statement may seem an exag- 

 geration. But on one range of forest-clad hills on the great plateau 

 between Lake Nyassa and Tanganyika I have walked for miles through 

 trees, every one of which, without exception, was ramified, more or 



