Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/770

748, passing onward for delivery to the workers who are waiting to carry them to the nurseries where they are hatched. Assiduous attention meantime is paid to the queen by other workers, who feed her diligently, with much self-denial stuffing her with morsel after morsel from their own jaws. A guard of honor in the shape of a few of the larger soldier-ants is also in attendance as a last and almost unnecessary precaution. In addition, finally, to the soldiers, workers, and queen, the royal chamber has also one other inmate—the king. He is a very ordinary-looking insect (Fig. 9), about the same size as the soldiers, but the arrangement of the parts of the head and body is widely different, and like the queen he is furnished with eyes.

Let me now attempt to show the way in which the work of the termites bears upon the natural agriculture and geology of the tropics. Looking at the question from the large point of view, the general fact to be noted is, that the soil of the tropics is in a state of perpetual motion. Instead of an upper crust, moistened to a paste by the autumn rains, and then baked hard as adamant in the sun, and an under soil, hermetically sealed from the air and light, and inaccessible to all the natural manures derived from the decomposition of organic matters these two layers being eternally fixed in their relation to one another we have a slow and continued transference of the layers always taking place. Not only to cover their depredations, but to dispose of the earth excavated from the underground galleries, the termites are constantly transporting the deeper and exhausted soils to the surface. Thus there is, so to speak, a constant circulation of earth in the tropics, a plowing and harrowing, not furrow by furrow and clod by clod, but pellet by pellet and grain by grain.

Some idea of the extent to which the underlying earth of the tropical forests is thus brought to the surface will have been gathered from the facts already described; but no one who has not seen it with his own eyes can appreciate the gigantic magnitude of the process. Occasionally one sees a whole trunk or branch, and sometimes almost an entire tree, so swathed in red mud that the bark is almost completely concealed, the tree looking as if it had been taken out bodily and dipped in some crystallizing solution. It is not. only one tree here and there that exhibits the work of the white ant, but in many places the whole forest is so colored with dull-red tunnels and patches as to give a distinct tone to the landscape—an effect which, at a little distance, reminds one of the abend-roth in a pine-forest among the Alps. Some regions are naturally more favorable than others to the operations of the termites, and to those who have only seen them at work in India or in the lower districts of Africa this statement may seem an exaggeration. But on one range of forest-clad hills on the great plateau between Lake Nyassa and Tanganyika I have walked for miles through trees, every one of which, without exception, was ramified, more or