usness from sudden eclipse. Fortunately, if
careful, one need not be bitten oftener than once or twice in a
lifetime. This wonderful electric species is about three fourths of an
inch long. Bears are fond of them, and tear and gnaw their home-logs to
pieces, and roughly devour the eggs, larvae, parent ants, and the rotten
or sound wood of the cells, all in one spicy acid hash. The Digger
Indians also are fond of the larvae and even of the perfect ants, so I
have been told by old mountaineers. They bite off and reject the head,
and eat the tickly acid body with keen relish. Thus are the poor biters
bitten, like every other biter, big or little, in the world's great
family.

There is also a fine, active, intelligent-looking red species,
intermediate in size between the above. They dwell in the ground, and
build large piles of seed husks, leaves, straw, etc., over their nests.
Their food seems to be mostly insects and plant leaves, seeds and sap.
How many mouths Nature has to fill, how many neighbors we have, how
little we know about them, and how seldom we get in each other's way!
Then to think of the infinite numbers of smaller fellow mortals,
invisibly small, compared with which the smallest ants are as mastodons.

_June 14._ The pool-basins below the falls and cascades hereabouts,
formed by the heavy down-plunging currents, are kept nicely clean and
clear of detritus. The heavier parts of the material swept over the
falls are heaped up a short distance in front of the basins in the form
of a dam, thus tending, together with erosion, to increase their size.
Sudden changes, however, are effected during the spring floods, when the
snow is melting and the upper tributaries are roaring loud from "bank to
brae." Then boulders that have fallen into the channels, and which the
ordinary summer and winter currents were unable to move, are suddenly
swept forward as by a mighty besom, hurled over the falls into these
pools, and piled up in a new dam together with part of the old one,
while some of the smaller boulders are carried further down stream and
variously lodged according to size and shape, all seeking rest where the
force of the current is less than the resistance they are able to offer.
But the greatest changes made in these relations of fall, pool, and dam
are caused, not by the ordinary spring floods, but by extraordinary ones
that occur at irregular intervals. The testimony of trees growing on
flood boulder deposits