and active warfare, however, are equally useless.  The carpenter-ant has no moral sense, and is not amenable either to kindness or blows.  On one occasion, when a body of these intrusive creatures had constructed an absurdly conspicuous brown gallery straight across the ceiling of my drawing-room, I determined to declare open war against them, and, getting my black servant to bring in the steps and a mop, I proceeded to demolish the entire gallery just after breakfast.  It was about 20 feet long, as well as I can remember, and perhaps an inch in diameter.  At one o’clock I returned to lunch.  My black servant pointed, with a broad grin on his intelligent features, to the wooden ceiling.  I looked up; in those three hours the carpenter-ants had reconstructed the entire gallery, and were doubtless mocking me at their ease, with their uplifted antennae, under that safe shelter.  I retired at once from the unequal contest.  It was clearly impossible to go on knocking down a fresh gallery every three hours of the day or night throughout a whole lifetime.

Ants, says Mr. Wallace, without one touch of satire, ’force themselves upon the attention of everyone who visits the tropics.’  They do, indeed, and that most pungently; if by no other method, at least by the simple and effectual one of stinging.  The majority of ants in every nest are of course neuters, or workers, that is to say, strictly speaking, undeveloped females, incapable of laying eggs.  But they still retain the ovipositor, which is converted into a sting, and supplied with a poisonous liquid to eject afterwards into the wound.  So admirably adapted to its purpose is this beautiful provision of nature, that some tropical ants can sting with such violence as to make your leg swell and confine you for some days to your room; while cases have even been known in which the person attacked has fainted with pain, or had a serious attack of fever in consequence.  It is not every kind of ant, however, that can sting; a great many can only bite with their little hard horny jaws, and then eject a drop of formic poison afterwards into the hole caused by the bite.  The distinction is a delicate physiological one, not much appreciated by the victims of either mode of attack.  The perfect females can also sting, but not, of course, the males, who are poor, wretched, useless creatures, only good as husbands for the community, and dying off as soon as they have performed their part in the world—­another beautiful provision, which saves the workers the trouble of killing them off, as bees do with drones after the marriage flight of the queen bee.