246 INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



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 3 . 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 b . 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 deplore that they entirely 

 consumed a collection of insects made for me by a friend 

 in India, more especially as it sickened him of the em- 

 ployment. 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 suppose were strongly im- 

 bued with it, and perhaps on that account were not less 

 to the taste of our epicure Termites. Having left a 

 compound microscope 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 



* Japan, ii. 127- b Political Essay on New Spain, iv. 135. 



