nment,
and from first to last I was never wholly relaxed, or quite
unconscious of what would happen if a chair-leg broke, or a bamboo
fell across the outhouse.

I swiveled round on the chair-seat and counted eight lines of army
ants on the ground, converging to the post at my elbow. Each was four
or five ranks wide, and the eight lines occasionally divided or
coalesced, like a nexus of capillaries. There was a wide expanse of
sand and clay, and no apparent reason why the various lines of
foragers should not approach the nest in a single large column. The
dividing and redividing showed well how completely free were the
columns from any individual dominance. There was no control by
specific individuals or soldiers, but, the general route once
established, the governing factor was the odor of contact.

The law to pass where others have passed is immutable, but freedom of
action or individual desire dies with the malleable, plastic ends of
the foraging columns. Again and again came to mind the comparison of
the entire colony or army with a single organism; and now the home,
the nesting swarm, the focus of central control, seemed like the body
of this strange amorphous organism--housing the spirit of the army.
One thinks of a column of foragers as a tendril with only the tip
sensitive and growing and moving, while the corpuscle-like individual
ants are driven in the current of blind instinct to and fro, on their
chemical errands. And then this whole theory, this most vivid simile,
is quite upset by the sights that I watch in the suburbs of this ant
home!

The columns were most excellent barometers, and their reaction to
passing showers was invariable. The clay surface held water, and after
each downfall the pools would be higher, and the contour of the little
region altered. At the first few drops, all the ants would hasten, the
throbbing corpuscles speeding up. Then, as the rain came down heavier,
the column melted away, those near each end hurrying to shelter and
those in the center crawling beneath fallen leaves and bits of clod
and sticks. A moment before, hundreds of ants were trudging around a
tiny pool, the water lined with ant handrails, and in shallow places,
veritable formicine pontoons,--large ants which stood up to their
bodies in water, with the booty-laden host passing over them. Now, all
had vanished, leaving only a bare expanse of splashing drops and wet
clay. The sun broke through and the residue rain ti