The Termites, or White Ants 107 



even be imagined. But according to African travelers the direct results 

 of the presence of such a population are very apparent. Drummond 

 (Tropical Africa, i8gi) writes: "You build your house, perhaps, and for 

 a few months fancy you have pitched upon the one solitary site in the coun- 

 try where there are no white ants. But one day suddenly the door-post 

 totters, and lintel and rafters come down together with a crash. You look 

 at a section of the wrecked timbers, and discover that the whole inside is 

 eaten clean away. The apparently sohd logs of which the rest of the house 

 is built are now mere cylinders of bark, and through the thickest of them 

 you could push your Httle finger. Furniture, tables, chairs, chests of drawers, 

 everything made of wood, is inevitably attacked, and in a single night a 

 strong trunk is often riddled through and through, and turned into match- 

 wood. There is no limit, in fact, to the depredation of these insects, and 

 they will eat books, or leather, or cloth, or anything; and in many parts of 

 Africa I believe if a man lay down to sleep with a wooden leg it would be 

 a heap of sawdust in the morning! So much feared is this insect now that 

 no one in certain parts of India and Africa ever attempts to travel with such 

 a thing as a wooden trunk. On the Tanganyika plateau I have camped on 

 ground which was as hard as adamant, and as innocent of white ants appar- 

 ently as the pavement of St. Paul's, and awakened next morning to find a 

 stout wooden box almost gnawed to pieces. Leather portmanteaus share 

 the same fate, and the only substances which seem to defy the marauders 

 are iron and tin." 



But more impressive than this devastation of houses, tables, and boxes is the 

 sight of millions of trees in some districts plastered over with tubes, galleries, 

 and chambers of earth due to the amazing toil of the termites in their search 

 for dead or dying wood for food. According to Drummond, these tunnels 

 are made of pellets of soil brought from underground, and stuck together 

 with saliva. The quantity of soil thus brought above ground is enormous^ 

 and Drummond sees in this phenomenon a result very similar to that accom- 

 plished by earthworms in other parts of the world, and made famiUar to 

 us by Darwin, namely, a natural tillage of the soil. As Drummond says: 

 "In.stead 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 eter- 

 nally fixed in their relations to one another — we have a slow and continued 

 transference of the layers always taking place. Not only to cover their 

 depredations, but to dispose of the earth e.xcavated from the under- 

 ground galleries, the termites are constantly transporting the deeper 

 and exhausted soils to the surface. Thus there is, so to speak, a con- 

 stant circulation of earth in the tropics, a ploughing and harrowing, not 



