4 INSECTS ABROAD. 



Take two more insects, which are beyond measure annoying to 

 man, — namely, the wood-boring beetles and the termites, other- 

 wise, but very wrongly, called white ants. Nothing can be more 

 disheartening to a planter than to have his trees and canes 

 devoured by the beetles, and every bit of timber in his house 

 destroyed by the termites. We shall in the course of this work 

 see examples of the ravages of both insects, so that we need 

 not go into details now. Yet, strange as it may seem, but for 

 the effects of these wood-destroying insects there would be no 

 forests at all. Suppose, for example, that all these insects were 

 immediately exterminated, the results would be much as follows. 

 A vast tree, one of the giants of the forests, dies, and is blown 

 down in one of the fierce hurricanes of tropical climates. Where 

 the tree fell, there it lies, and where it lies it cumbers the earth, 

 and prevents other trees from springing up in its place. Years 

 roll on and become centuries, tree after tree falls, and slowly 

 but surely arrives the time when the place of the towering 

 forest, with all its wealth of life, is taken by a vast wilderness 

 of dead and fallen tree-trunks. 



How different is the beneficent operation of Nature under the 

 present conditions. Scarcely has a tree fallen than the insect 

 hosts are at work on it. First come the large and powerful 

 wood-boring beetles and deposit their eggs upon it. Armed 

 with their sharp and strong jaws, which act like bone-nippers, 

 the larvae bore through and through the trunk, making tunnels like 

 auger-holes, and so rendering the tree permeable to air and wet. 

 Smaller beetles soon follow in the wake of the large, and bore 

 out the softened wood, and a host of other insects set to work 

 on the now decaying trunk, many Using it as food, and others 

 carrying it off as material for their nests. The rapidity of their 

 work is astonishing, and in an exceedingly short time the entire 

 tree is reduced to mere dust. " Put thy foot," writes Waterton, 

 in his "Wanderings," "on that large trunk thou seest to thy 

 left. It seems entire amid the surrounding fragments. Mere 

 outward appearance, delusive phantom of what it once was ! 

 Tread on it, and, like the fuzz-ball, it will break into dust," 

 And this dust serves as a fertilizer to the soil, and enables it to 

 produce fresh trees in the place of that which had fallen. 



Take the white ants again, even apart from their wood-eating 

 propensities, and see what good service they do even by the 



