ere chirping and hopping about on the very edge of the
jungle, but I did not have to go that far. As I passed the doorless
entrance of the outhouse I looked up, and there was an immense mass of
some strange material suspended in the upper corner. It looked like
stringy, chocolate-colored tow, studded with hundreds of tiny ivory
buttons. I came closer and looked carefully at this mushroom growth
which had appeared in a single night, and it was then that my eyes
began to perceive and my mind to record, things that my reason
besought me to reject. Such phenomena were all right in a dream, or
one might imagine them and tell them to children on one's knee, with
wind in the eaves--wild tales to be laughed at and forgotten. But this
was daylight and I was a scientist; my eyes were in excellent order,
and my mind rested after a dreamless sleep; so I had to record what I
saw in that little outhouse.

This chocolate-colored mass with its myriad ivory dots was the home,
the nest, the hearth, the nursery, the bridal suite, the kitchen, the
bed and board of the army ants. It was the focus of all the lines and
files which ravaged the jungle for food, of the battalions which
attacked every living creature in their path, of the unnumbered rank
and file which made them known to every Indian, to every inhabitant of
these vast jungles.

Louis Quatorze once said, "_L'Etat, c'est moi!_" but this figure of
speech becomes an empty, meaningless phrase beside what an army ant
could boast,--"_La maison, c'est moi!_" Every rafter, beam, stringer,
window-frame and door-frame, hall-way, room, ceiling, wall and floor,
foundation, superstructure and roof, all were ants--living ants,
distorted by stress, crowded into the dense walls, spread out to
widest stretch across tie-spaces. I had thought it marvelous when I
saw them arrange themselves as bridges, walks, handrails, buttresses,
and sign-boards along the columns; but this new absorption of
environment, this usurpation of wood and stone, this insinuation of
themselves into the province of the inorganic world, was almost too
astounding to credit.

All along the upper rim the sustaining structure was more distinctly
visible than elsewhere. Here was a maze of taut brown threads
stretching in places across a span of six inches, with here and there
a tiny knot. These were actually tie-strings of living ants, their
legs stretched almost to the breaking-point, their bodies the
inconspicuous knots or n