st her forelegs. When at last a good-sized ball was formed,
she picked it up, turned around and, after some fussy indecision,
deposited it on the sand behind her. Then she returned to the very
shallow, round depression, and began to gather a second ball.

I thought of the first handful of sand thrown out for the base of
Cheops, of the first brick placed in position for the Great Wall, of a
fresh-cut trunk, rough-hewn and squared for a log-cabin on Manhattan;
of the first shovelful of earth flung out of the line of the Panama
Canal. Yet none seemed worthy of comparison with even what little I
knew of the significance of this ant's labor, for this was earnest of
what would make trivial the engineering skill of Egyptians, of Chinese
patience, of municipal pride and continental schism.

Imagine sawing off a barn-door at the top of a giant sequoia, growing
at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and then, with five or six children
clinging to it, descending the tree, and carrying it up the canyon
walls against a subway rush of rude people, who elbowed and pushed
blindly against you. This is what hundreds of leaf-cutting ants
accomplish daily, when cutting leaves from a tall bush, at the foot of
the bank near the laboratory.

There are three dominant labor-unions in the jungle, all social
insects, two of them ants, never interfering with each other's field
of action, and all supremely illustrative of conditions resulting from
absolute equality, free-and-equalness, communalism, socialism carried
to the (forgive me!) anth power. The Army Ants are carnivorous,
predatory, militant nomads; the Termites are vegetarian scavengers,
sedentary, negative and provincial; the Attas, or leaf-cutting ants,
are vegetarians, active and dominant, and in many ways the most
interesting of all.

The casual observer becomes aware of them through their raids upon
gardens; and indeed the Attas are a very serious menace to agriculture
in many parts of the tropics, where their nests, although underground,
may be as large as a house and contain millions of individuals. While
their choice among wild plants is exceedingly varied, it seems that
there are certain things they will not touch; but when any
human-reared flower, vegetable, shrub, vine, or tree is planted, the
Attas rejoice, and straightway desert the native vegetation to fall
upon the newcomers. Their whims and irregular feeding habits make it
difficult to guard against them. They will work all