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disorganised the termites, he conducted his crusade, against, un- 
doubtedly, the worst enemy the planter has at present, with un- 
qualified success, and 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 i§ 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, f 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 will 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 
s-econd 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 1 have seen 
thousands of both cuffee 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 
tree„s 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, 
Termes gestroi make no mounds at all and their queens are always 
found in a nest of soft fibrous material and not in bard clay cones 
such as those in which the common bellicosus queens are encased. 
Mr. Pear'S experience that Ficus elaitsca does better when plant- 
