point in the work of the white ant remains to be noted. I
have already said that the white ant is never seen. Why he should have
such a repugnance to being looked at is at first sight a mystery,
seeing that he himself is stone blind. But his coyness is really due
to the desire for self-protection; for the moment his juicy body shows
itself above ground there are a dozen enemies waiting to devour it.
And yet the white ant can never procure any food until it comes above
ground. Nor will it meet the case for the insect to come to the
surface under the shadow of night. Night in the tropics, so far as
animal life is concerned, is as the day. It is the great feeding-time,
the great fighting-time, the carnival of the carnivores, and of all
beasts, birds, and insects of prey, from the least to the greatest. It
is clear then that darkness is no protection to the white ant; and yet
without coming out of the ground it cannot live. How does it solve the
difficulty? It takes the ground out along with it. I have seen white
ants working on the top of a high tree, and yet they were underground.
They took up some of the ground with them to the tree-top; just as the
Esquimaux heap up snow, building it into the low tunnel-huts in which
they live, so the white ants collect earth, only in this case not from
the surface, but from some depth underneath the ground, and plaster it
into tunneled ways. Occasionally these run along the ground, but more
often mount in endless ramifications to the top of trees, meandering
along every branch and twig, and here and there debouching into large
covered chambers which occupy half the girth of the trunk. Millions of
trees in some districts are thus fantastically plastered over with
tubes, galleries, and chambers of earth, and many pounds' weight of
subsoil must be brought up for the mining of even a single tree. The
building material is conveyed by the insects up a central pipe with
which all the galleries communicate, and which at the downward end
connects with a series of subterranean passages leading deep into the
earth. The method of building the tunnels and covered ways is as
follows: At the foot of a tree the tiniest hole cautiously opens in
the ground close to the bark. A small head appears, with a grain of
earth clasped in its jaws. Against the tree trunk this earth-grain is
deposited, and the head is withdrawn. Presently it reappears with
another grain of earth; this is laid beside the first, ramm