Show SOUTH AFRICAN ANTS Their Predatory Powers The Aard vaarks Work Tommy at the front will be making acquaintance now with a great many animals and Insects with whose friendship friend-ship he would gladly dispense One of the pests of South Africa arc the ants the black ones that prey upon a mans person when they get the chance and the white ones that cat and enjoy anything any-thing from a pair of boots to a bedroom bed-room curtain When Baldwin was hunting In Africa between the years 1552 and 1SGO taking the country between Natal and the Zambesi for Ills quarry he fell In constantly con-stantly with these ants So vicious were the attentions of the black ones that valiant hunter though he was they came off the victors In a tussle between himself and them Had sonje exciting sport with seaS sea-S QOWS In a narrow river with very high i reeds on both banks he writes In his diary To get a shot I was obliged to climb the trees overhanging the river and had one or two good chances but the villianous black ants fell upon me vigorously and In such countless multitudes multi-tudes biting so severely that flesh and blood could not possibly hold out another an-other second I was forced to descend and an old sea cow I had been dodging for two hours is Indebted to the black ants for her life The white ants arc exceedingly fond of raiding the happy homes of the colonists colo-nists They undermine the foundations by eating through them a trick well known to the contingent from Australia Austra-lia where this creature Is as much a pest as he la In South Africa Tommy Tom-my ° from the Australian colonies will rank as an old stager when dealings with these destructive nuisances arc being carried on and will be able to narrate many a harrowing tory con corning them and their prowess There are several varieties of the ant tribe but they all seem to be fully impressed im-pressed with the proverb In union Is strength A housemistress will go to bod happy one evening and the next morning when she descends will be confronted con-fronted with the mangled remains of what the night before had been her sit tingroom carpet A hearty meal has been furnished by it to legions of ants who have not had the honesty to come by day for the hospitality that they know would be denied them but have secretly made their way through the lloor a vast and greedy army and have departed again before the household house-hold has awakened The anthills of South Africa will be a revelation to Tommy Fancy a mound thirty feet high and 100 feet in circumference circum-ference H Lincoln Tangye the African Afri-can traveler refers In his book In New South Africa to the protection these heaps afforded his camp We made our camp on the sloping sides of a huge anthill protected by its mass and the clump of trees growing on It from tho bitter southeast wind On ono hill he counted twenty trees of various va-rious sizes growing the majority of them thirty or forty feet In height Happily there Is ant bear In South Africa The Boers call it aardvaark tho earth pig It and the ants are deadly enemies and both work at night In Its habit of boring the aardvaark Is like the mole but it is a much moro terrifying creature to come across unexpectedly un-expectedly than Is the little brown creature crea-ture with which Englishmen are familiar fa-miliar This busy underground marauder forgets for-gets to fill up the holes It makes when It arrives on the outer crust of the veldt with the consequence that to the rider these arc pitfalls more dangerous than are the rabbit holes In an English warren to horsemen here It also causes consternation to the nervous by tunneling just sufficiently high to create cre-ate a series of convulsive earthquakes as a guide lo Its subterranean promenades prome-nades Not guessing what the cause Is It Is alarming to sqe the ground rlpplo all of a sudden and iriounda of loose earth bo thrown up here and there The aardvaark Is so ugly and its appearance is so sudden and totally unannounced un-announced that stalwart men have been known to flee before St A colonist colo-nist recalls one story of the war In Zululand Zu-luland when an ant bear confronted a sentry oil guard one midnight with the result that Tommy was so taken aback that he fled immediately startling start-ling the camp with the awful news that the old gentleman was In their midst London Mall |