The Termites, or White Ants 
107 
even be imagined. But according to African travelers the direct results 
of the presence of such a population are very apparent. Drummond 
(Tropical Africa, 1891) writes: “You build your house, perhaps, and for 
a few 7 months fancy you have pitched upon the one solitary site in the coun¬ 
try where there are no white ants. But one day suddenly the door-post 
totters, and lintel and rafters come down together with a crash. You look 
at a section of the wrecked timbers, and discover that the whole inside is 
eaten clean away. The apparently solid logs of which the rest of the house 
is built are now mere cylinders of bark, and through the thickest of them 
you could push your little finger. Furniture, tables, chairs, chests of drawers, 
everything made of wood, is inevitably attacked, and in a single night a 
strong trunk is often riddled through and through, and turned into match- 
wood. There is no limit, in fact, to the depredation of these insects, and 
they will eat books, or leather, or cloth, or anything; and in many parts of 
Africa I believe if a man lay down to sleep with a wooden leg it would be 
a heap of sawdust in the morning! So much feared is this insect now that 
no one in certain parts of India and Africa ever attempts to travel with such 
a thing as a wooden trunk. On the Tanganyika plateau I have camped on 
ground which was as hard as adamant, and as innocent of white ants appar¬ 
ently as the pavement of St. Paul’s, and awakened next morning to find a 
stout wooden box almost gnawed to pieces. Leather portmanteaus share 
the same fate, and the only substances which seem to defy the marauders 
are iron and tin.” 
But more impressive than this devastation of houses, tables, and boxes is the 
sight of millions of trees in some districts plastered over with tubes, galleries, 
and chambers of earth due to the amazing toil of the termites in their search 
for dead or dying wood for food. According to Drummond, these tunnels 
are made of pellets of soil brought from underground, and stuck together 
with saliva. The quantity of soil thus brought above ground is enormous, 
and Drummond sees in this phenomenon a result very similar to that accom¬ 
plished by earthworms in other parts of the world, and made familiar to 
us by Darwin, namely, a natural tillage of the soil. As Drummond says: 
“Instead of an upper crust, moistened to a paste by the autumn rains and 
then baked hard as adamant in the sun, and an under soil hermetically sealed 
from the air and light, and inaccessible to all the natural manures derived 
from the decomposition of organic matters—these two layers being eter¬ 
nally fixed in their relations to one another—we have a slow and continued 
transference of the layers always taking place. Not only to cover their 
depredations, but to dispose of the earth excavated from the under¬ 
ground galleries, the termites are constantly transporting the deeper 
and exhausted soils to the surface. Thus there is, so to speak, a con¬ 
stant circulation of earth in the tropics, a ploughing and harrowing, not 
