74 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



applies to those curious little geologists, the marmots and chipmunks, 

 which one sees throwing up their tiny heaps of sand and gravel on 

 the American prairies. And, though the torrid zone boasts of a strong- 

 limbed and almost steel-shod creature, the ant-bear, his ravages are 

 limited to the destruction of the nests of ants ; and, however much this 

 somewhat scarce animal contributes to the result, we must look in 

 another direction for the true tropical analogue of the worm. 



The animal we are in search of, and which I venture to think equal 



to all the necessities of the case, is the ter- 

 mite or white ant. It is a small insect (Fig. 

 1), with a bloated yellowish-white body and 

 a somewhat large thorax, oblong-shaped, 

 and colored a disagreeable oily brown. 

 The flabby, tallow-like body makes this 

 insect sufficiently repulsive, but it is for 

 quite another reason that the white ant is 

 the worst abused of all living vermin in 

 warm countries. The termite lives almost 

 exclusively upon wood ; and, the moment 

 a tree is cut or a log sawed for any eco- 

 nomical purpose, this insect is upon its 



Pig. 1. Worker White Ant (nat- t r\ j.t~ *. 



nrai size and magnified). track. One may never see the insect, pos- 



sibly, in the flesh, for it lives under-ground ; 

 but its ravages confront one at every turn. You build your house, 

 perhaps, and for a few months fancy you have pitched upon the 

 one solitary site in the country where there are no white ants. But 

 one day suddenly the door-post totters, and lintel and rafters come 

 down together with a crash. You look at a section of the wrecked 

 timbers and discover that the whole inside is eaten clean away. The 

 apparently solid logs of which the rest of the house is built are now 

 mere cylinders of bark, and through the thickest of them you could 

 push your little finger. Furniture, tables, chairs, chests of drawers, 

 everything made of wood is inevitably attacked, and in a single night 

 a strong trunk is often riddled through and through, and turned into 

 match-wood. There is no limit, in fact, to the depredation by these 

 insects, and they will eat books, or leather, or cloth, or anything, and 

 in many parts of Africa I believe if a man lay down to sleep with a 

 wooden leg it would be a heap of sawdust in the morning. So much 

 feared is this insect now, that no one in certain parts of India and 

 Africa ever attempts to travel with such a thing as a wooden trunk. 

 On the Tanganyika plateau I have camped on ground which was as 

 hard as adamant, and as innocent of white ants apparently as the 

 pavement of St. Paul's, and wakened next morning to find a stout 

 wooden box almost gnawed to pieces. Leather portmanteaus share 

 the same fate, and the only substances which seem to defy the ma- 

 rauders are iron and tin. 



