of Edinburgh, Session 1884-85. 
139 
Termitidae, and is not an ant at all, is a small ant-shaped insect, with 
a bloated, yellowish-white abdomen, and a somewhat large thorax, 
oblong-shaped, and in colour a disagreeable oily brown. There are 
three or four different species of termites, and their geographical 
range is probably second in extent only to that of the earth-worm. 
The white ants are found in enormous numbers throughout the 
length and breadth of Africa and India ; they occur in South 
America, Australia, and Ceylon; and every sub-tropical region is 
more or less infested by them. The insects themselves, owing to a 
peculiarity in their habits, are rarely seen, but throughout large 
districts in Africa the ground is literally living with them. On the 
Tanganyika plateau I have camped at night on ground which was as 
hard as adamant, and as innocent of white ants apparently as the 
pavement of St Paul’s, and wakened next morning to find all the 
wooden articles in my tent almost gnawed to pieces. The termite 
lives almost exclusively upon dried wood, and it is upon a peculiarity 
in its mode of securing this that its agricultural and geological func- 
tions largely depend, so far at least as Central Africa is concerned. 
I have just said that the white ant is never seen above the surface 
of the ground ; and yet, without coming to the surface, it cannot 
secure the decaying branches, fallen trunks, and dead wood on 
which it lives. How does it solve the difficulty h It takes some of 
the ground out along with it. 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; just as the 
Esquimaux heap up snow, building it into the low tunnel-huts in 
which they live, so the white ants collect earth, only in this case 
not from the surface but from some depth underneath the ground, 
and plaster it into tunnelled ways. Occasionally these run along 
the ground, but more often mount in endless ramifications to the 
top of trees, meandering along every branch and twig, and here and 
there debouching into large covered chambers which occupy half the 
girth of the trunk. Millions of trees in some districts are thus 
fantastically plastered over with tubes, galleries, and chambers of 
earth, and many pounds weight of subsoil must be brought up for 
the mining of even a single tree. The building material is conveyed 
by the insects up a central pipe with which all the galleries com- 
municate, and which at the downward end connects with a series of 
