DESTRUCTIVE WOOD-BORERS. 139 



seeming indifference to torture, comparable only to the Ame- 

 rican Indian. De Geer affirms, upon experiments which it 

 needs not to repeat, that " you may maim, pull limb from 

 limb, or roast over a slow fire this pertinacious creature, and 

 not a joint will move in token that it suffers. A curious in- 

 stance, this, of the unconquerable power of an instinct im- 

 planted for self-preservation." 



However insignificant in their imputed attributes, these 

 wood-boring beetles are by no means despicable in their actual 

 proceedings. Where abundant, not only chairs, tables, and 

 books, have been reduced to powder, but even buildings have 

 suffered from their combined agency. Curtis mentions the 

 roof of King's College, Cambridge, having been seriously da- 

 maged by their operations, and thinks that the same species 

 (the Anobium tessellatum) has been known to cut through 

 sheet-lead. He had himself seen tinfoil perforated by the 

 grub of another species, also an underminer of floors, a 

 destroyer of herbariums, and of ship-biscuit. 



Besides the above, there is another insect death-watch, in 

 the ear of the vulgar of very similar and, doubtless, confound- 

 ed sound, although, in the eye of the naturalist, it is a piece of 

 living mechanism of make and structure altogether different. 

 This is no ticking beetle, but a ticking wood or timber-louse 

 a Termes, allied to those far-famed destructives, the white 

 ants of Africa and Southern Europe. Mr. Rennie thus 

 describes it: "It is not so large as the common louse, but 



