entional casting out of these offspring, as was so
obviously the case with the debris from the food of the colony. The
eleven or twelve ants which fell upon me during my watch were all
smaller workers, no larger ones losing their grip.

While recording some of these facts, I dropped my pencil, and it was
fully ten minutes before the black mass of enraged insects cleared
away, and I could pick it up. Leaning far over to secure it, I was
surprised by the cleanliness of the floor around my chair. My clothes
and note-paper had been covered with loose wings, dry skeletons of
insects and the other debris, while hundreds of other fragments had
sifted down past me. Yet now that I looked seeingly, the whole area
was perfectly clean. I had to assume a perfect jack-knife pose to get
my face near enough to the floor; but, achieving it, I found about
five hundred ants serving as a street-cleaning squad. They roamed
aimlessly about over the whole floor, ready at once to attack
anything of mine, or any part of my anatomy which might come close
enough, but otherwise stimulated to activity only when they came
across a bit of rubbish from the nest high overhead. This was at once
seized and carried off to one of two neat piles in far corners. Before
night these kitchen middens were an inch or two deep and nearly a foot
in length, composed, literally, of thousands of skins, wings, and
insect armor. There was not a scrap of dirt of any kind which had not
been gathered into one of the two piles. The nest was nine feet above
the floor, a distance (magnifying ant height to our own) of nearly a
mile, and yet the care lavished on the cleanliness of the earth so far
below was as thorough and well done as the actual provisioning of the
colony.

As I watched the columns and the swarm-nest hour after hour, several
things impressed me;--the absolute silence in which the ants
worked;--such ceaseless activity without sound one associates only
with a cinema film; all around me was tremendous energy, marvelous
feats of achievement, super-human instincts, the ceaseless movement of
tens of thousands of legionaries; yet no tramp of feet, no shouts, no
curses, no welcomes, no chanties. It was uncanny to think of a race
of creatures such as these, dreaded by every living being, wholly
dominant in their continent-wide sphere of action, yet born, living
out their lives, and dying, dumb and blind, with no possibility of
comment on life and its fullness, of cen