INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 141 



substances, and scarcely ever attacking their outside, until first they have 

 concealed it and their operations with a coat of clay. A general similarity 

 runs through the proceedings of the whole tribe; but the large African 

 species (called by Smeathman Termes bellicosus), T. fatalis, is the most 

 formidable. These insects live in large clay nests, from whence they 

 excavate tunnels all round, often to the extent of several hundred feet ; 

 from these they will descend a considerable depth below the foundation of 

 a house, and rise again through the floors ; or, boring through the posts 

 and supports of the building, enter the roof, and construct there their 

 galleries in various directions. If a post be a convenient path to the roof, 

 or has any weight to support, which how they discover is not easily con- 

 jectured, they will fill it with their mortar, leaving only a track-way for 

 themselves ; and thus, as it were, convert it from wood into stone as hard 

 as many kinds of freestone. In this manner they soon destroy houses, 

 and sometimes even whole villages when deserted by their inhabitants, so 

 that in two or three years not a vestige of them will remain. 



These insidious insects are not less expeditious in destroying the 

 wainscoting, shelves, and other fixtures of a house, than the house itself. 

 With the most consummate art and skill they eat away the inside of what 

 they attack, except a few fibres here and there, which exactly suffice to 

 keep the two sides, or top and bottom, connected, so as to retain the 

 appearance of solidity after the reality is gone ; and all the while they 

 carefully avoid perforating the surface, unless a book or any other thing that 

 tempts them should be standing upon it. Kaempfer, speaking of the white 

 ants of Japan, gives a remarkable instance of the rapidity with which these 

 miners proceed. Upon rising one morning he observed that one of their 

 galleries of the thickness of his little finger had been formed across his 

 table ; and upon a further 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. 1 

 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. 8 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 employment. 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 imbued 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 it, and had 



1 Japan, ii. 127. 2 Political Essay on New Spain, iv. 135. 



