disorganised the termites, he conducted his crusade, against, un- 

 doubtedly, the worst enemy the planter has at present, with un- 

 qualified success, an*d to him must belong the credit of having put 

 us all on to the right track, of course it is not every proprietor 

 who can afford to dig over the whole of his estate at an expendi- 

 ture of $3 an acre which is the minimum cost of such work if 

 thoroughly done, nor do I think such a procedure at all necessary 

 unless the place is riddled from end to end or " cultivation " is 

 aimed at as well as the destruction of the termites. It will be quite 

 sufficient if starting from the attacked tree, the ground is dug 

 right down on the alluvial to water level, i. e. 2\ to 3 feet, or on 

 high land as far as the termites are found to go, and for a distance 

 of not less than ten feet in every direction ; outside this distance 

 the line of the ants should be followed, if possible, up to the nest 

 and the queen destroyed. If this treatment is thoroughly carried 

 out it will not require to be repeated, or at any rate, not until an 

 entirely fresh attack takes place ; I have tried it over and over 

 again now and have so far never had a tree attacked a second 

 time. I even go so far as to say that if the ants do reappear with- 

 in say 3 days, the Superintendent should make the coolie do the 

 digging over again without any pay as a punishment for bad work. 

 This may appear a strong statement, and rather hard on the coolie, 

 but when it is considered that termites work in bodies from a com- 

 mon centre, the nest of their queen, it is obvious that the breaking 

 up of their lines of communication is a blow to them, which, even 

 though the destruction of the colony be incomplete, must at any 

 rate, constitute a check from which it will take them long to re- 

 cover, for it may, I think, safely be said, that not one in a thousand 

 termites that have been cut off from their "way home'', ever find 

 it again, as directly they are exposed on the surface countless 

 numbers of black and red ants fall on them and carry them off ; 

 the ants remaining in the undestroyed nest (which by the way is 

 almost always found in a log or the stump of an old tree) in course 

 of time they wid no doubt reorganize and return to the attack, but 

 it will take them a very long time to get back to the same tree a 

 second time. Regarding the fungus theory I must confess that I 

 do* not think the termes gestroi is specially attracted to a tree 

 because it has been rendered moribund by fungus, for I have seen 

 thousands of both coffee and rubber trees covered with gestroi and 

 yet without a trace of fungus about the roots or base of stem. It 

 is a common thing, however, to see rubber, and indeed any other 

 trees which have been killed by fungus simply riddled with Termes 

 bellicosus, but these termites I have never known to attack a 

 living tree, unless in quest of a dead branch or decayed knot in 

 the stem, and then they do little or no damage, simply tunnelling 

 up on the outside, without feeding on the tree at all until they 

 reach their objective. As far as I have been able to observe, 

 Tomes gestroi make no mounds at all and their queens are always 

 found in a nest of soft fibrous material and not in hard clay cones 

 such as those in which the common bcllicosus queens are encased. 

 Mr. Pear's experience that Ficus elaitsca does better when plant- 



