round a garden for
weeks, perhaps pass through it _en route_ to some tree that they are
defoliating, and then suddenly, one night, every Atta in the world
seems possessed with a desire to work havoc, and at daylight the next
morning, the garden looks like winter stubble--a vast expanse of stems
and twigs, without a single remaining leaf. Volumes have been written,
and a whole chemist's shop of deadly concoctions devised, for
combating these ants, and still they go steadily on, gathering leaves
which, as we shall see, they do not even use for food.

Although essentially a tropical family, Attas have pushed as far north
as New Jersey, where they make a tiny nest, a few inches across, and
bring to it bits of pine needles.

In a jungle Baedeker, we should double-star these insects, and paragraph
them as "_Atta_, named by Fabricius in 1804; the Kartabo species,
_cephalotes_; Leaf-cutting or Cushie or Parasol Ants; very abundant.
_Atta_, a subgenus of _Atta_, which is a genus of _Attii_,
which is a tribe of _Myrmicinae_, which is a subfamily of
_Formicidae_," etc.

With a feeling of slightly greater intimacy, of mental possession, we
set out, armed with a name of one hundred and seventeen years'
standing, and find a big Atta worker carving away at a bit of leaf,
exactly as his ancestors had done for probably one hundred and
seventeen thousand years.

We gently lift him from his labor, and a drop of chloroform banishes
from his ganglia all memory of the hundred thousand years of pruning.
Under the lens his strange personality becomes manifest, and we wonder
whether the old Danish zoologist had in mind the slender toe-tips
which support him, or in a chuckling mood made him a namesake of C.
Quintius Atta. A close-up shows a very comic little being, encased in
a prickly, chestnut-colored armor, which should make him fearless in a
den of a hundred anteaters. The front view of his head is a bit
mephistophelian, for it is drawn upward into two horny spines; but the
side view recalls a little girl with her hair brushed very tightly up
and back from her face.

The connection between Atta and the world about him is furnished by
this same head: two huge, flail-shaped antennae arching up like aerial,
detached eyebrows--vehicles, through their golden pile, of senses
which foil our most delicate tests. Outside of these are two little
shoe-button eyes; and we are not certain whether they reflect to the
head ganglion two or three hund