24 The Study of Animal Life part i 



graph of worms would afford much entertainment and information 

 at the same time, and would open a large and new field in natural 

 history. " 



After a while the discerning did go to work, and Hensen 

 published an important memoir in 1877, while Darwin's 

 " good monograph " on the formation of vegetabFe mould 

 appeared after about thirty years' observation in 1881 ; and 

 now we all say with him, " It may be doubted whether there 

 are many other animals which have played so important a 

 part in the history of the world as have these lowly-organised 

 creatures." 



Prof. Drummond, while admitting the supreme import- 

 ance of the work of earthworms, eloquently pleads the claims 

 of the Termite or White Ant as an agricultural agent. This 

 insect, which dwelt upon the earth long before the true ants, 

 is abundant in many countries, and notably in Tropical 

 Africa. It ravages dead wood with great rapidity. " If 

 a man lay down to sleep with a wooden leg, it would be a 

 heap of sawdust in the morning," while houses and decaying 

 forest trees, furniture and fences, fall under the jaws of the 

 hungry Termites. These fell workers are blind and live 

 underground ; for fear of their enemies they dare not show 

 face, and yet without coming out of their ground they cannot 

 live. 



" How do they solve the difficulty? They take the ground out 

 along with them. I have seen white ants working on the top of a 

 high tree, and yet they were underground. They took up some of 

 the ground with them to the tree-top. They construct tunnels 

 which run from beneath the soil up the sides of trees and posts ; 

 grain after grain is carried from beneath and mortared with a sticky 

 secretion into a reddish sandpaper-like tube ; this is rapidly ex- 

 tended to a great height — even of 30 feet from the ground— till 

 some dead branch is reached. Now as many trees in a forest are 

 thus plastered with tunnels, and as there are besides elaborate 

 subterranean galleries and huge obelisk-like ant-hills, sometimes 

 10-15 fsst high, it must be granted that the Termites, like the 

 earthworms, keep the soil circulating. The earth-tubes crumble 

 to dust, which is scattered by the wind ; the rains lash the forests 

 and soils with fury and wash off the loosened grains to swell the 

 alluvium of a distant valley. " 



