EA.TEN our OF HOUSE AND HOME. 199 



way to prevent their ravages is to place the legs of every 

 chair and table in pans of water, a precaution, which, of 

 course, is out of the question with door-posts, &c., and thus 

 it happens that all the timber of a house may be perforated 

 in every direction until nothing but a thin crust, no thicker 

 than a sheet of paper, remains. 



In some cases they seem to know when a post has 

 a weight to support, and are careful to fill it up with 

 clay; but where the woodwork is not used as a prop, 

 they see no need for such precautions, and the owner 

 who is thus literally " eaten out of house and home " may 

 be first made aware of the fact by finding his window-sills 

 crumbling away beneath his touch. 



Neither wine-casks nor scientific instruments are safe from 

 them, and at Tobago they once caused the loss of almost 

 a pipe of Madeira wine. But they do not confine their 

 attentions to wood. An unfortunate engineer in Brazil who 

 had just returned from an expedition with a collection of 

 plans, &c., left his trunk on a table for the night and found 

 next morning that all his clothes and papers had been de- 

 stroyed,'not a square inch of the latter being left, while every 

 atom of pencil, lead and all, had entirely disappeared. 

 Boots and shoes they will devour in a. single night, and one 

 wonders how the dwellers in equinoctial America contrive to 

 keep a roof over their heads or clothes on their backs, and 

 it certainly is no marvel to learn that it was a rare thing to 

 find among the natives any papers more than fifty or sixty 

 years old in Humboldt's day. 



Several species inhabit the warmer parts of Europe, and 

 a colony, probably imported from the West Indies, have 



