INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 209 



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. Keempfer, 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 examin- 

 ation he found that they had bored a passage of that thick- 

 ness 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.^ 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.^ 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 w^ere 

 strongly imbued with it, and perhaps on that account were 

 not less to the taste of our epicure Termites, Having left a 



1 Japan, ii. 127. 

 VOL. I. 



2 Political Essay on New Spain, iv. 135. 

 P 



