ILLUSTEATIVE NOTES. 319 



of wliicli they relieve him — man would have remained the miserable 

 slave of his feeble organization. Borne down by the habitual dispro- 

 portion of weight and streng-th, either he would have abandoned 

 labour, have lived upon chance victims, without art or progress ; or, 

 rather, he would have lived earth's everlasting porter — crooked, 

 dragging, and drawing, with sunken head, never gazing on the sky, 

 never thinking, never raising himself to the heights of invention. 



Page 132. On the ijoiver of insects. — It is not only in the Tropical 

 world that they are formidable ; at the commencement of the last 

 century half Holland perished because the piles which strengthen its 

 dykes simultaneously gave way, invisiljly undermined by a worm 

 named the taret. 



This redoubtable nibbler, which is often a foot in lenofth, never 

 betrays itself; it only works within. One morning the beam breaks, 

 the framework yields, the ship engulfed founders in the waves. 



How shall we reach, how discover it ? A bird knows it — the 

 lapwing, the guardian of Holland. And it is thus a notable impru- 

 dence to destroy, as has been done, his eggs. (Quatrefages, Souvenirs 

 (V un Natura liste. ) 



France, for more than a centuiy, has suffered from the impor- 

 tation of a monster not less terrible — the termite, which devours 

 dry wood just as the taret consumes wet wood. The single 

 female of each swarm has the homble fecundity of laying daily 

 eighty i thousand eggs. La Rochelle begins to fear the fate of 

 that American city which is suspended in the air, the termitee 

 having devoured all its foundations, and excavated immense cata- 

 combs beneath. 



