The White Ant. 



97 



useful work, because it makes the soil so 

 much deeper and richer; but as the white 

 ants eat dry wood wherever they can find 

 it, without thinking about the consequences, 

 they do a great deal of damage when they 

 get into buildings — and there is no possi- 

 bility of keeping them out. They make 

 their nests in the mud walls of the natives' 

 houses, and then eat up all the inside of the 

 beams and rafters, until there is nothing but 

 a shell left as thick as paper. Smeathman 

 says that they find out which beams sup- 

 port the principal weight and fill up the 

 inside with hard cement. I have never 

 seen them do this, but they build their 

 pyramids with an outer crust as hard as 

 freestone, and the walls of their under- 

 ground nests are built of the same material, 

 so I think it very likely that they some- 

 times select the largest beams to build 

 their nests in, and fashion them with the 

 same material. Whether they pass the 

 earth through their bodies with their food 

 as the earth worms do, or whether they 

 simply prepare it in their mouths, I do not 

 know. 



They eat pine and other soft woods so 

 quickly that no one ever uses such wood in 

 India. The deodar, or cedar of Lebanon 

 timber, they will not touch, but no wood 

 is too hard for their little jaws. Nearly all 

 the furniture in India is made of rosewood, 

 and as long as it is moved and dusted every 

 day it is safe, but a common article in the 

 houses of Europeans in India is a round 

 center table on a very solid pedestal, with 

 another solid foot-piece held about three 

 inches from the floor by four feet. These 

 tables they constantly attack; they get 

 underneath the foot piece and build little 

 hollow cylinders as thick as a quill up from 

 the floor, and run up and down inside them, 

 and if they are left unmolested they soon 

 hollow out the foot-piece and the pedestal, 

 leaving nothing but a thin shell. 



I once packed a very valuable lot of sev- 

 eral hundred books in cases, and stored 



them for six months while I went to the 

 hills, and on my return I found the books 

 partially eaten, and all spoiled. They eat 

 leather too, very greedily, leaving nothing 

 but a little layer of fine granular mould. 

 They have been troublesome in the Gov- 

 ernment treasuries. Hundreds of thou- 

 sands of rupees are kept piled up in bags 

 of five hundred or a thousand, and some- 

 times the white ants get in and eat all the 

 bags. 



Some years ago an East Indian treas- 

 ury clerk was two thousand rupees short, 

 and when asked to account for it, said the 

 white ants must have eaten it ; but the 

 treasury officer did not believe him, nor 

 would any one else, for although the white 

 ants have strong jaws, they cannot eat 

 silver. 



The white ants commonly form their col- 

 onies and build their towns below ground, 

 dividing them into a great many apart- 

 ments for dwellings, store-rooms, nurseries 

 and a royal chamber, with a great many 

 passages running from one to the other; 

 but their most wonderful structures are the 

 pyramids figured in the cut, which they 

 sometimes build above ground in India and 

 in Africa, making them generally five or 

 six feet through at the base, and raising; 

 them six or eight feet high. They build 

 these pyramids of quite soft wet mud, but 

 it dries in a few days and becomes as hard 

 as stone. This is because each little pellet 

 is either mixed up or coated with the saliva 

 or secretion of the ant, which cements it all 

 together and hardens it, most likely by 

 chemical action. 



They did not build these pyramids in 

 very ancient times, and most likely not un- 

 til man had been a long time on the earth. 

 We know this because they never build 

 them on the bare ground, but only when 

 they have the stump *of a tree to build 

 around, and it is very rare to find a stump 

 unless the tree has been cut down. If they 

 alwavs built their towns above ground in. 



