240 REMARKABLE FECUNDITY. 
This soft and whitish-looking creature, a stomach rather than a 
being, is at least of the size of the human thumb: a traveller pretends 
to have seen one as large as a crab. 
The bigger she is, the more fertile, the more inexhaustible, this 
terrible mother of lice seems the more enthusiastically worshipped by 
her fanatical vermin. She appears to be their ideal, their poetry, their 
ecstasy. If you carry them off, with a fragment, a ruin of the city, 
you may see them, under a glass shade, instantly set to work to build 
an arch for the protection of the mother’s venerated head, to recon- 
struct her royal hall, which will become, if the materials be sufficient, 
the centre and basis of the resuscitated community. 
I am not astonished, let me add, at the extravagant love which 
they show towards this instrument of fecundity. If every other race 
did not jointly labour to destroy them, this truly prodigious mother 
would make them masters of the world,—nay, what do I say ?—its 
only inhabitants. The fish alone would survive ; but the insect world 
would perish. It suffices to remember that the queen-bee takes a year 
to accomplish what the termite mother accomplishes ina day. Through 
her means they would swallow up Everybody; but they are feeble and 
savoury, and it is Everybody which swallows up them. 
When the species of termites which live and dwell in the woods 
unfortunately approach near our habitations, there is no means of 
arresting their ravages. They work with a truly incredible vigour 
and rapidity. They have been known in one night to eat their way 
through the lee of a table, then through the thickness of the table 
itself, descending through the leg on the opposite side. 
The reader can easily imagine the effect produced by such toil as 
this on the joists and framework of a house. The worst of it is, that 
a long time may elapse before their ravages are detected. We continue 
to rely upon supports which suddenly, one fine morning, crumble away ; 
we sleep peacefully under roofs which to-morrow will cease to exist. 
The town of Valencia, in New Grenada, undermined by the sub- 
terranean galleries these insects have excavated in the earth, is now 
literally suspended upon their dangerous catacombs. 
We have ourselves seen, at Rochelle, the formidable beginnings of 
