314 HALF HOURS WITH INSECTS. [Packard. 



blood. The patience and perseverance under great natural 

 difficulties, the danger to which they are exposed from the 

 attacks of their unwilling hosts would form an interesting 

 chapter, but we must come now to the true builders. 



The ants are their own architects, their own masons and 

 laborers. I shall not now speak of their colonies and com- 

 plex mode of life. It is well known that the workers carry 

 on the labors of the colony, and to these beings, which have 

 not the power of transmitting their qualities, but inherit 

 them from their parents, has been imparted a high degree 

 of skill, in fact, somewhat of those qualities which charac- 

 terize the highest types of human civilization ; for, Avhile 

 ants are fully capable of defending themselves, and as every 

 Fig 246 body knows are bold and aggressive to a fault, 

 the}' also excel in the arts of peace. 



As bridge-makers they have anticipated our civil 

 engineers. The driver ants, Anomma (Fig. 24G), 

 which are blind, are said by Dr. G. A. Perkins, 

 who has observed them in Western Africa, to 

 "often bridge narrow streams of water when these 

 come across their path, by going in large numbers 

 upon a flexible plant on one side of a stream, until 

 river n . ^j^^j^. ^j^jgi^t causes it to bend to the other side." 

 This ant is certainly equal, in this respect at least, to the 

 monkeys which are said to cross streams in a similar manner. 

 But it is in the construction of underground tunnels that 

 ants ai-e preeminent. The late Gideon Lincecum, so well 

 known for his acute powers of observation, in an account 

 of the CEcodoma Texana states tliat "they often carry their 

 subterranean roads for several hundred yards in grassy dis- 

 tricts, where the grass would prove an impediment to their 

 progress. On one occasion, to secure access to a gentle- 

 man's garden, where they were cutting the vegetables to 

 pieces, they tunnelled beneath a creek which was at that 

 place fifteen or twenty feet desp, and from bank to bank 



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