10 



INSECT ARCHITECTURE. 



in trees, in such formidable numbers, that whole 

 forests perish, beyond the power of remedy. The 

 pines of the Hartz have thus been destroyed to an 

 enormous extent; and in North America, at one 

 place in South Carolina, at least ninety trees in 

 every hundred, upon a tract of two thousand acres, 

 were swept away by a small, black, winged bug. And 

 yet, accor(,ling to Wilson, the historian of American 

 birds, the people of the United States were in the habit 

 of destroying the red-headed woodpecker, the great 

 enemy of these insects, because he occasionally spoilt 

 an apple.* The same delightful writer, and true natu- 

 rahst, speaking of the labours of the ivory-billed wood- 

 pecker, says, " would it be believed that the larvee of 

 an insect, or fly, no larger than a grain of rice, should 

 silently, and in one season, destroy some thousand 

 acres of pine trees, many of them from two to three 

 feet in diameter, and a hundred and fifty feet high.^ 

 in some places the whole woods, as far as you can 

 see around you, are dead, stripped of the bark, their 

 wintry-looking arms and bare trunks bleaching in 

 the sun, and tumbling in ruins before every blast. "| 

 The subterraneous larva of a species of beetle {Zabrus 

 gibbus) has often caused a complete failure of the 

 seed-corn, as in the district of Halle in 18 12. J The 

 corn-weevil, which extracts the flour from grain, 

 leaving the husk behind, will destroy the contents of 

 the largest storehouses in a very short period. The 

 wire-worm, and the turnip-fly, are dreaded by every 

 farmer. The ravages of the locust are too well known 

 not to be at once recollected, as an example of the 

 formidable collective power of the insect race. The 

 white ants of tropical countries sweep away whole 

 villages, with as much certainty as a fire or an inun- 



* Amer. Orinth.,i.,p, 144. t lb., iii.,p. 21, | Blumenbach. 



