In this way almost all the native
trees have at last acquired some special means of protection against the
ravages of the leaf-cutters; so that they immediately fall upon all
imported and unprotected kinds as their natural prey. This ingenious and
wholly satisfactory explanation must of course go far to console the
Brazilian planters for the frequent loss of their orange and coffee
crops.
Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the Darwinian theory
(whose honours he waived with rare generosity in favour of the older and
more distinguished naturalist), tells a curious story about the
predatory habits of these same Sauebas. On one occasion, when he was
wandering about in search of specimens on the Rio Negro, he bought a
peck of rice, which was tied up, Indian fashion, in the local bandanna
of the happy plantation slave. At night he left his rice incautiously on
the bench of the hut where he was sleeping; and next morning the Sauebas
had riddled the handkerchief like a sieve, and carried away a gallon of
the grain for their own felonious purposes. The underground galleries
which they dig can often be traced for hundreds of yards; and Mr. Hamlet
Clarke even asserts that in one case they have tunnelled under the bed
of a river where it is a quarter of a mile wide. This beats Brunel on
his own ground into the proverbial cocked hat, both for depth and
distance.
Within doors, in the tropics, ants are apt to put themselves obtrusively
forward in a manner little gratifying to any except the enthusiastically
entomological mind.
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