But I need not go on with this itinerary. It is very much the same thing over again. For some time yet you must imagine the curious procession I have described wandering hither and thither among the wooded mountains and valleys of the table-land, and going through the same general programme. You might have seen its chief getting browner and browner in the tropical sun, his clothes getting raggeder and raggeder, his collecting-boxes becoming fuller and fuller, and his desire to get home again growing stronger and stronger. Then you might have seen the summer end and the tropical rains begin, and the whole country suddenly clothe itself with living green. And then, as the season advanced, you might have seen him plodding back to the Lake, between the attacks of fever working his way down the Shiré and Zambesi, and so, after many days, greeting the new spring in England. VI. THE WHITE ANT. A THEORY. A few years ago, under the distinguished patronage of Mr. Darwin, the animal in vogue with scientific society was the worm. At present the fashionable animal is the ant. I am sorry, therefore, to have to begin by confessing that the insect whose praises I propose to sing, although bearing the honored name, is not entitled to consideration on account of its fashionable connections, since the white ant, as an ant, is an impostor. It is, in fact, not an ant at all, but belongs to a much humbler family--that of the _Termitidæ_--and so far from ever having been the vogue, this clever but artful creature is hated and despised by all civilized peoples. Nevertheless, if I mistake not, there is neither among the true ants, nor among the worms, an insect which plays a more wonderful or important part in nature. [Illustration: NEST OF THE WHITE ANT. 1, Male. 2, 4, 5, Neuters. 3, Gravid Female.] Fully to appreciate the beauty of this function, a glance at an apparently distant aspect of nature will be necessary as a preliminary. When we watch the farmer at work, and think how he has to plough, harrow, manure, and humor the soil before even one good crop can be coaxed out of it, we are apt to wonder how nature manages to secure her crops and yet dispense with all these accessories. The world is one vast garden, bringing forth crops of the most luxuriant and varied kind century after century, and millennium after millennium. Yet the face of nature is nowhere furrowed by the plough, no harrow disintegrates the clods, no lime and phosphates are strewn upon its fields, no visible tillage of the soil improves the work on the great world's farm.