A literature dealing with the white ant hav grown up, but it has mainly appeared in the form of highly technical papers in, various scientific periodicals, scattered and inaccessible to the' average men. Hints of a social organization even more wonderful than those of the bee and the true ant have been given from time to time, but it has remained for the poet," dramatist, philosopher, Maurice Macter-Hinek, whose classic, "The Life of the Bee," never has been surpassed in the annals of natural history writing, to gather together the facts about the white ant in one book and present the story in a readable form to the world at large, and a wonderful story it is that he tells, These helpless—or so it would seem from their general appear= ance—these tiny, helpless, wingless, soft-bodied, blind insects that, when disturbed, appear merely to run about aimlessly in great confusion, secking the nearest hole or crevice in which to hide, these underground, sickly, white, magrotylooking creatures, on examination, turn out to be members of a marvellous underworld state, containing millions upon millions of citizens governed by immutable social Jaws, yet eapable.of an extra-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.