240 GO TO THE ANT 



stripped young plantations of orange, coffee, and mango 

 trees stark naked. He ingeniously accounts for this curious 

 fact by supposing that an internecine struggle has long 

 been going on in the countries inhabited by the Saiibas 

 between the ants and the forest trees. Those trees that 

 best resisted the ants, owing either to some unpleasant 

 taste or to hardness of foliage, have in the long run sur- 

 vived destruction ; but those wliich were suited for the 

 purpose of the ants have been reduced to nonentity, while 

 the ants in turn were getting slowly adapted to attack 

 other trees. In this way almost all the native trees have 

 at last acquired some special means of protection against 

 the ravages of the leaf-cutters ; so that they immediately 

 fall upon all imported and unprotected kinds as their 

 natural prey. This ingenious and wholly satisfactory ex- 

 planation must of course go far to console the Brazilian 

 planters for the frequent loss of their orange and coffee 

 crops. 



Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the 

 Darwinian theory (whose honours he waived with rare 

 generosity in favour of the older and more distinguished 

 naturalist), tells a curious story about the predatory habits 

 of these same Saiibas. On one occasion, when he was wan- 

 dering about in search of specimens on the Rio Negro, he 

 bought a peck of rice, which was tied up, Indian fashion, in 

 the local bandanna of the happy plantation slave. At night 

 he left his rice incautiously on the bench of the hu t where 

 he was sleeping; and next morning the Saiibas had riddled 

 the handkerchief like a sieve, and carried away a gallon of 

 the grain for their own felonious purposes. The under- 

 ground galleries which they dig can often be traced for 

 hundreds of yards ; and Mr. Hamlet Clarke even asserts 

 that in one case they have tunnelled under the bed of a 

 river where it is a quarter of a mile wide. This beats 



