176 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



rles in various directions. If a post be a convenient path to the roof, or 

 has any weight to support, which how they discover is not easily conjec- 

 tured, they will fill it with their mortar, leaving only a track-way for them- 

 selves ; and thus, as it were, convert it from wood into stone as hard as 

 many kinds of freestone. In this manner they soon destroy houses, and 

 sometimes even whole villages when deserted by their inhabitants, so that 

 in two or three years not a vestige of them will remain. 



These insidious insects are not less expeditious in destroying the wain- 

 scoting, shelves, and other fixtures of a house, than the house itself. With 

 the most consummate art and skill they eat away the inside of what they 

 attack, except a few fibres here and there, which exactly suffice to keep 

 the two sides, or top and bottom, connected, so as to retain the appearance 

 of solidity after the reality is gone ; and all the while they carefully avoid 

 perforating the surface, unless a book or any other thing that tempts 

 them should be standing upon it. Ksempfer, speaking of the white ants 

 of Japan, gives a remarkable instance of the rapidity with which these 

 miners proceed. Upon rising one morning he observed that one of their 

 galleries of the thickness of his little finger had been formed across his 

 table ; and upon a further examination he found that they had bored a passage 

 of that thickness up one foot of the table, formed a gallery across it, and 

 then pierced down another foot into the floor: all this was done in the 

 few hours that intervened between his retiring to rest and his rising.^ 

 They make their way also with the greatest ease into trunks and boxes, 

 even though made of mahogany, and destroy papers and every thing they 

 contain, constructing their galleries and sometimes taking up their abode 

 in them. Hence, as Humboldt informs us, throughout all the warmer 

 parts of equinoctial America, where these and other destructive insects 

 abound, it is infinitely rare to find papers which go fifty or sixty years 

 back.^ In one night they will devour all the boots and shoes that are left 

 in their way ; cloth, linen, or books are equally to their taste ; but they 

 will not eat cotton, as Captain Green informs me. I myself have to de- 

 plore that they entirely consumed a collection of insects made for me by 

 a friend in India, more especially as it sickened him of the employment. 

 In a word, scarcely any thing, as I said before, but metal or stone comes 

 amiss to them. Mr. Smeathman relates, that a party of them once took 

 a fancy to a pipe of fine old Madeira, not for the sake of the wine, almost 

 the whole of which they let out, but of the staves, which however I sup- 

 pose were strongly imbued with it, and perhaps on that account were not 

 less to the taste of our epicure Termites. Having left a compound micro- 

 scope in a warehouse at Tobago for a few months, on his return he found 

 that a colony of a small species of white ant had established themselves 

 in it, and had devoured most of the wood-work, leaving little besides the 

 metal and glasses.^ A shorter period sufficed for their demolition of some 

 of Mr. Forbes's furniture. On surveying a room which had been locked 

 up during an absence of a few weeks, he observed a number of advanced 

 work3 in various directions towards some prints and drawings in English 

 frames ; the glasses appeared to be uncommonly dull, and the frames 



1 Japan, n. 127. ^ Political Essay on New Spain, iv. 135. 



3 This account of the Termites is chiefly taken from Smeathman in Fhilos. Trans. 1781, 

 and Percival's Ceylon, 307. 



