76 EDGE OF THE JUNGLE 
outhouse. I can account for this only by pre- 
suming that a certain percentage of the nurses 
were very young and inexperienced workers and 
dropped their burdens inadvertently. There was 
certainly no intentional casting out of these off- 
spring, as was so obviously the case with the 
débris from the food of the colony. The eleven 
or twelve ants which fell upon me during my 
watch were all smaller workers, no larger ones 
losing their grip. 
While recording some of these facts, I dropped 
my pencil, and it was fully ten minutes before 
the black mass of enraged insects cleared away, 
and I could pick it up. Leaning far over to 
secure it, I was surprised by the cleanliness of 
the floor around my chair. My clothes and note- 
paper had been covered with loose wings, dry 
skeletons of insects and the other débris, while 
nundreds of other fragments had sifted down 
past me. Yet now that I looked seeingly, the 
whole area was perfectly clean. I had to as- 
sume a perfect jack-knife pose to get my face 
near enough to the floor; but, achieving it, I 
found about five hundred ants serving as a street- 
cleaning squad. They roamed aimlessly about 
over the whole floor, ready at once to attack any- 
