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thoroughly infested by them, the surface of the sills being gen¬ 
erally gnawed or riddled to the depth of an inch or more. The 
clapboards, eaten in many places to a shell, were readily broken 
by the fingers, the ends of the boards especially being eaten and 
broken away. The window-casing above and below the window 
was almost completely hollowed out; even the shingles on the roof 
contained many ants; and the floor was also somewhat eaten. 
This damage extended across both ends of the lean-to, which was 
about ten feet wide, but did not reach the main part of the 
house. 
Two years before, in 1884, the owner had taken a board from 
the cave to the granary, and in 1886 the floor of the oats bin 
had broken through, spilling the oats upon the ground. An ex¬ 
amination of pieces of wood from this building showed that the 
ants had practically eaten up the floor, and that they had also 
gnawed away the surface of the wooden lining of the bin as high 
as the grain extended, sometimes to a depth of half an inch or more. 
In the woods near the saw-will whence the oak lumber for this 
farmer’s “cave” originally came, I found an abundance of white 
ants in fallen rotten wood. 
After my visit the owner destroyed his granary and thoroughly 
cleaned out the cave, burning up all the damaged wood, but neg¬ 
lected to follow my advice to kill all the ants on his premises 
with kerosene or gasoline. They were consequently still continu¬ 
ing their injuries to the house in 1888, and had also infested a 
corn-crib near by. About May 20 of that year they swarmed on 
two different days, many thousands of large brownish ants com¬ 
ing out of the walls of the house, indoors and out, and flying 
away. “Wherever they came out,” writes Mr. Smith, “they passed 
between rows of soldier ants which stood with their heads just 
protruding from the cracks and holes of the walls. 
An interesting case, similar to the above, was reported to me 
in June, 1890, by Mr. A. Harrison, of Dunlap, Peoria county. 
In this instance also the ants had thoroughly tunneled, weakened, 
and largely destroyed one side of a house, working upon the 
studding around the windows and doors and hollowing out the 
clapboards or outer covering of the wall. In this case experi¬ 
ments at destroying them with turpentine and kerosene were only 
partially successful, because of the difficulty of reaching them 
without tearing the house to pieces. The owner finally reported 
complete success with sulphur smoke, the sulphur being burned 
in a can with a spout through which the smoke could be driven 
into the infested wall. Injury to another house in the neighbor¬ 
hood was also reported at this time. 
In Yarna, Marshall county, the house of Mrs. E. B. Green had 
been infested for several years when the owner wrote me in 1888. 
At this time the wood-work of the windows had been honey¬ 
combed and the supports of a heavy chimney undermined. 
White ants were also found by us in a house which belonged 
to Judge Yaughan, near Tonti, in Marion county, where they had 
come up through a carpet from the floor beneath and had hol- 
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