ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 319 
of which they relieve him—man would have remained the miserable 
slave of his feeble organization. Borne down by the habitual dispro- 
portion of weight and strength, either he would have abandoned 
labour, have lived upon chance victims, without art or progress ; or, 
rather, he would have lived earth’s everlasting porter—crooked, 
dragging, and drawing, with sunken head, never gazing on the sky, 
never thinking, never raising himself to the heights of invention. 
Page 132. On the power of insects.—It is not only in the Tropical 
world that they are formidable; at the commencement of the last 
century half Holland perished because the piles which strengthen its 
dykes simultaneously gave way, invisibly undermined by a worm 
named the turet. 
This redoubtable nibbler, which is often a foot in length, never 
betrays itself; it only works within. One morning the beam breaks, 
the framework yields, the ship engulfed founders in the waves. 
How shall we reach, how discover it? A bird knows it—the 
lapwing, the guardian of Holland. And it is thus a notable impru- 
dence to destroy, as has been done, his eggs. (Quatrefages, Souvenirs 
Lun Naturaliste.) 
France, for more than a century, has suffered from the impor- 
tation of a monster not less terrible—the termite, which devours 
dry wood just as the taret consumes wet wood. The single 
female of each swarm has the horrible fecundity of laying daily 
eighty thousand eggs. La Rochelle begins to fear the fate of 
that American city which is suspended in the air, the termites 
having devoured all its foundations, and excavated immense cata- 
combs beneath. 
