197 
burrowed and hollowed out, while the books and papers con¬ 
tained were more or less damaged by the ants. There was thus a 
complicated and continuous system of covered galleries and of 
tunnels through stone, brick, and wood leading from the earth out¬ 
side the State House into and through a series of four basement 
rooms. The mode of access to the fifth, isolated room was not 
discovered. 
In one of these rooms some old cases of poplar shelves made 
at the old State House sixteen years before had been stored for 
many years. These cases were very badly burrowed, the bottom 
boards especially being reduced to shells and breaking in two when 
lifted; and it seems possible that the ants were brought into these 
rooms originally in these old bookcases. 
v It was evident in all these rooms that it was the woodwork of 
the cases that attracted the white ants primarily, injuries to books 
and papers being wholly secondary. Further, damage to both 
wood aud paper, while not confined to moist materials, was very 
much more general and thorough in them than in dry objects. One 
very badly infested storage case in the southeast room of the base¬ 
ment, the first of the series above mentioned, contained papers 
none of which were infested, although the bottom of the case was 
completely honeycombed and supported in some places only by 
masses of clay which the ants had substituted for the devoured 
wood. This clay was itself tunneled and chambered in every di¬ 
rection. Pieces of 2x4 pine used as supports under the shelves 
were burrowed from end to end and through and through, and in 
fact the whole structure next the floor was little more than a mass 
of rubbish. 
The nature of the injuries to books contained in infested cases 
is well illustrated by the frontispiece to this Report. At the lettered 
points on this plate burrows extend directly into the book, at a and 
h through the entire volume (528 pages). Sometimes such channels 
run from book to book, perforating several volumes in succession. 
Stored boxes of paper were found in one of the rooms, which had 
not been moved for about two years. The boards under these 
boxes had been completely honeycombed, and the ants had bur¬ 
rowed upward some inches into the mass of paper itself. 
In the various chambers and runways exposed by these investi¬ 
gations, quantities of ants were found at the time of Mr. Marten’s 
visit, the greater part of them wingless workers, a few of them 
soldiers, and a few young larvae. A small number of so-called 
pupae —that is young of the sexual forms whose wings are not yet 
grown, but are represented by wing-pads—were mingled with the 
crowd, but no fully developed males and females and no eggs 
were seen. 
The only remedy found necessary in this case was a thorough 
cleaning out of the rooms, the burning or heating of the infested 
objects, and the removal of the books and papers to cases so built 
and placed that they did not come in contact with the wall and 
touched the cement floor only at a fr.w points of support. In 
