white ants apparently as the pavement of St. Paul's, and wakened next morning to find a stout wooden box almost gnawed to pieces. Leather portmanteaus share the same fate, and the only substances which seem to defy the marauders are iron and tin. [Illustration: THE MOUNDS OF THE WHITE ANT.] But what has this to do with earth or with agriculture? The most important 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 ant collects earth, only in this case not from the surface but from some depth underneath the ground, and plaster it into tunnelled 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, rammed tight against it, and again the builder descends underground for more. The third grain is not placed against the tree, but against the former