WHITE ANTS 171 



experience showed me that this idea was incorrect. 

 Out of the many chambers that I opened, I never 

 found one that contained water, or whose walls were 

 in the least degree damper than the ground elsewhere. 



Not only are the ants more numerous here than 

 at my previous stations, but the mounds they throw up 

 are larger and loftier. Some of them just now present 

 a most picturesque appearance ; they are covered with 

 a fungus of a pretty green colour, and what with their 

 conical summits and wide flanking buttresses, they do 

 really very much resemble those steep, forest-covered 

 mountains that one sees represented in Chinese pictures 

 of their gardens and landscapes. 



Small, soft, and feeble as the white ants are, yet 

 by their numbers and powers of destruction they have 

 influenced to some extent both the architecture and 

 also the civilization of the country. To their ravages, 

 which prevent much the use of timber, is in a great 

 measure due the massive solidity of the grander 

 Indian edifices, and by their devouring of papers and 

 documents they have restricted the cultivation of 

 literature ; they have rendered the preservation of 

 books difficult ; they have continuously destroyed the 

 records that would have thrown light on the history 

 of the past. 



It is providential that the white ants do not attack 

 the living as they do the dead vegetation, for otherwise 

 they would soon reduce the country to a desert. They 

 do, however, occasionally attack and destroy both 

 plants and trees. They eat away the bark of the tree, 

 and then when the wood is dry they excavate their 



