314 
HALF HOURS WITH INSECTS. [Packard. 
blood. The patience and perseverance under great natural 
difficulties, the danger to which they are exposed from the 
attacks of their unwilling hosts would form an interesting 
chapter, but we must come now to the true builders. 
The ants are their own architects, their own masons and 
laborers. I shall not now speak of their colonies and com¬ 
plex mode of life. It is well known that the workers carry 
on the labors of the colony, and to these beings, which have 
not the power of transmitting their qualities, but inherit 
them from their parents, has been imparted a high degree 
of skill, in fact, somewhat of those qualities which charac¬ 
terize the highest types of human civilization ; for, while 
ants arQ fully capable of defending themselves, and as every 
fig 246 body knows are bold and aggressive to a fault, 
they also excel in the arts of peace. 
As bridge-makers they have anticipated our civil 
engineers. The driver ants, Anomma (Fig. 246), 
which are blind, are said by Dr. G. A. Perkins, 
who has observed them in Western Africa, to 
“often bridge narrow streams of water when these 
come across their path, by going in large numbers 
upon a flexible plant on one side of a stream, until 
their weight causes it to bend to the other side.” 
This ant is certainly equal, in this respect at least, to the 
monkeys which are said to cross streams in a similar manner. 
But it is in the construction of underground tunnels that 
ants are preeminent. The late Gideon Lincecum, so well 
known for his acute powers of observation, in an account 
of tlie (Ecodoma Texana states that “they often carry their 
subterranean roads for several hundred yards in grassy dis¬ 
tricts, where the grass would prove an impediment to their 
progress. On one occasion, to secure access to a gentle¬ 
man’s garden, where they were cutting the vegetables to 
pieces, they tunnelled beneath a creek which was at that 
place fifteen or twenty feet deep, and from bank to bank 
26 
Driver Ant. 
