promptly picked up by several
kitchen-middenites and unceremoniously thrown on the pile of
nest-debris. A load of booty had been dumped among the cripples, and
as each wandered close to it, he seemed to regain strength for a
moment, picked up the load, and then dropped it. The sight of that
which symbolized almost all their life-activity aroused them to a
momentary forgetfulness of their disabilities. There was no longer any
place for them in the home or in the columns of the legionaries. They
had been court-martialed under the most implacable, the most impartial
law in the world--the survival of the fit, the elimination of the
unfit.

The time came when we had to get at our stored supplies, over which
the army ants were such an effective guard. I experimented on a
running column with a spray of ammonia and found that it created
merely temporary inconvenience, the ants running back and forming a
new trail. Formaline was more effective, so I sprayed the nest-swarm
with a fifty-per-cent solution, strong enough, one would think, to
harden the very boards. It certainly created a terrible commotion, and
strings of the ants, two feet long, hung dangling from the nest. The
heart of the colony came into view, with thousands of eggs and larvae,
looking like heaps of white rice-grains. Every ant seized one or the
other and sought escape by the nearest way, while the soldiers still
defied the world. The gradual disintegration revealed an interior
meshed like a wasp's nest, chambered and honeycombed with living tubes
and walls. Little by little the taut guy-ropes, lathes, braces,
joists, all sagged and melted together, each cell-wall becoming
dynamic, now expanding, now contracting; the ceilings vibrant with
waving legs, the floors a seething mass of jaws and antennae. By the
time it was dark, the swarm was dropping in sections to the floor.

On the following morning new surprises awaited me. The great mass of
the ants had moved in the night, vanishing with every egg and
immature larva; but there was left in the corner of the flat board a
swarm of about one-quarter of the entire number, enshrouding a host of
older larvae. The cleaning zones, the cripples' gathering-room, all had
given way to new activities, on the flat board, down near the kitchen
middens, and in every horizontal crack.

The cause of all this strange excitement, this braving of the terrible
dangers of fumes which had threatened to destroy the entire colony the