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.
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.
Now, in reality, there cannot be crops, or successions of crops, without the most thorough agriculture; and when we look more closely into nature we discover a system of husbandry of the most surprising kind. Nature does all things unobtrusively; and it is only now that we are beginning to see the magnitude of these secret agricultural operations by which she does already all that man would wish to imitate, and to which his most scientific methods are but clumsy approximations.
In this great system of natural husbandry nature uses agencies, implements, and tools of many kinds. There is the disintegrating frost, that great natural harrow, which bursts asunder the clods by the expansion during freezing of the moisture imprisoned in their pores. There is the communistic wind which scatters broadcast over the fields the finer soil in clouds of summer dust. There is the rain which washes the humus into the hollows, and scrapes bare the rocks for further denudation. There is the air which, with its carbonic acid and oxygen, dissolves and decomposes the stubborn hills, and manufactures out of them the softest soils of the valley. And there are the humic acids, generated through decay, which filter through the ground and manure and enrich the new-made soils.