Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/762

 applies to those curious little geologists, the marmots and chipmunks, which one sees throwing up their tiny heaps of sand and gravel on the American prairies. And, though the torrid zone boasts of a strong-limbed and almost steel-shod creature, the ant-bear, his ravages are limited to the destruction of the nests of ants; and, however much this somewhat scarce animal contributes to the result, we must look in another direction for the true tropical analogue of the worm.

The animal we are in search of, and which I venture to think equal to all the necessities of the case, is the termite or white ant. It is a small insect (Fig. 1), with a bloated yellowish-white body and a somewhat large thorax, oblong-shaped, and colored a disagreeable oily brown. The flabby, tallow-like body makes this insect sufficiently repulsive, but it is for quite another reason that the white ant is the worst abused of all living vermin in warm countries. The termite lives almost exclusively upon wood; and, the moment a tree is cut or a log sawed for any economical purpose, this insect is upon its track. One may never see the insect, possibly, in the flesh, for it lives under-ground; but its ravages confront one at every turn. You build your house, perhaps, and for a few months fancy you have pitched upon the one solitary site in the country where there are no white ants. But one day suddenly the door-post totters, and lintel and rafters come down together with a crash. You look at a section of the wrecked timbers and discover that the whole inside is eaten clean away. The apparently solid logs of which the rest of the house is built are now mere cylinders of bark, and through the thickest of them you could push your little finger. Furniture, tables, chairs, chests of drawers, everything made of wood is inevitably attacked, and in a single night a strong trunk is often riddled through and through, and turned into match-wood. There is no limit, in fact, to the depredation by these insects, and they will eat books, or leather, or cloth, or anything, and in many parts of Africa I believe if a man lay down to sleep with a wooden leg it would be a heap of sawdust in the morning. So much feared is this insect now, that no one in certain parts of India and Africa ever attempts to travel with such a thing as a wooden trunk. On the Tanganyika plateau I have camped on ground which was as hard as adamant, and as innocent of white ants apparently as the pavement of St. Paul's, and wakened next morning to find a stout wooden box almost gnawed to pieces. Leather portmanteaus share the same fate, and the only substances which seem to defy the marauders are iron and tin.