68 SOCIAL HABITATIONS. 
which may be imparted to all our organs in that higher 
sphere to which we fondly hope to rise. 
“ Where do these Ants get their moisture? Our house 
was built on a hard, ferruginous conglomerate, in order to 
be out of the way of the White Ant, but they came despite 
the precaution; and not only were they in this sultry 
weather able individually to moisten soil to the consistency 
of mortar for the formation of galleries, which in their way 
of working is done by night (so that they are screened from 
the observation of birds by day in passing and repassing 
towards any vegetable matter they may wish to devour), 
but, when their inner chambers were laid open, these were 
also surprisingly humid; yet there was no dew, and the 
house being placed on a rock, they could have no subter- 
ranean passage to the bed of the river, which ran about 
three hundred yards below the hill. Can it be that they 
have the power of combining the oxygen and hydrogen 
of their vegetable food by vital force as to form water ?” 
In corroboration of this opinion, Dr. Livingstone men- 
tions an insect found in Angola, and which is allied to the 
common cuckoo-spit of England, which has the property of 
pouring out great quantities of water, so that a group of 
seven or eight insects will produce three or four pints 
of water in the course of the night. After stating that 
he believes the water to be produced, not from the 
sap of the tree, but from the atmosphere, he proceeds as 
follows :— 
“Finding a colony of these insects busily distilling on 
a branch of the castor-oil plant, I denuded about twenty 
inches of the bark on the tree-side of the insects, and 
scraped away the inner bark, so as to destroy all the 
ascending vessels. I also cut a hole in the side of the 
branch, reaching to the middle, and then cut out the pith 
and internal vessels. The distillation was then going on at 
