them. Clearly, then, this fungus, which they cultivate themselves, must be their food—the ants are mushroom-growers. Mr. Belt concludes his very interesting account of the sauba ants with one more instance of their intelligence. “A nest,” he tells us, “was made near one of our tramways, and, to get to the trees, the ants had to cross the rails, over which the waggons were continually passing and repassing. Every time they came along, a number of ants were crushed to death. They persevered in crossing, for some time, but at last set to work and tunneled underneath each rail. One day, when the waggons were not running, I stopped up the tunnels with stones; but although great numbers carrying leaves were thus cut off from the nest, they would not cross the rails, but set to work making fresh tunnels underneath them. Apparently an order had gone forth, or a general understanding been come to, that the rails were not to be crossed.” CHAPTER X WHITE ANTS AND THEIR ARCHITECTURE—VERY WONDERFUL NESTS—“A PRISON AND A PALACE”—THE AARD VARK AND THE ANT-EATER—HOW ANTS ARE TRAPPED. In the white ants, or termites—to use their more scientific name—we have insects greatly resembling ants in their general plan and mode of life, and also much like them in general appearance, but which really are not ants at all, but belong to another order, widely distinct from them. They are Neuroptera, and thus allied to the dragon-flies, may-flies, grasshoppers, etc., whereas the real ants belong to the Hymenoptera, in which the bees and wasps are included. Like the ants, the termites are divided into males, females, and undeveloped females, or workers, which last form two castes that work in different ways, the one in building the nest, the other in defending it from attack—the former are the masons or architects, the latter the soldiers. In the matter of the nest, these white or false ants surpass all real ones, and therefore all other insects; it is built above, instead of below, the ground, and attains such a size, and rises to such a height, that these termite nests become a marked feature of any landscape, and may almost be said to turn a flat country into a hilly one. Rising in huge conical or beehive-shaped mounds, of a red colour and with lesser mounds dotted about them, they often support a more or less dense vegetation, upon which, in South Africa, where they are the largest, antelopes, or even buffaloes, may be sometimes seen browsing. The base of such a structure may be twenty yards in circumference, the height from ten to twenty feet, or even more. The masonry composing it is a sort of red clay, and seems, to the touch, as hard and solid as brick; though that it is not really so, is shown by its yielding to the stout curved claws and muscular fore limbs of the aard vark, a creature who lives almost wholly on the termites.