Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/766

744 idea will be formed of the magnitude of the operations of these insects and the extent of their influence upon the soil which they are thus ceaselessly transporting from underneath the ground.

In traveling through the great forests of the Rocky Mountains or of the Western States, the broken branches and fallen trunks strewing the ground breast-high with all sorts of decaying litter frequently make locomotion impossible. To attempt to ride through these Western forests, with their mesh-work of interlocked branches and decaying trunks, is often out of the question, and one has to dismount and drag



his horse after him as if he were clambering through a wood-yard. But in an African forest not a fallen branch is seen. One is struck at first by a certain clean look about the great forests of the interior, a novel and unaccountable cleanness, as if the forest-bed was carefully swept and dusted daily by unseen elves. And so, indeed, it is. Scavengers of a hundred kinds remove decaying animal matter—from the carcass of the fallen elephant to the broken wing of a gnat—eating it, or carrying it out of sight, and burying it in the deodorizing earth. And these countless millions of termites perform a similar function for the vegetable world, making away with all plants and trees, all stems,