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Updated: June 7, 2025
These rogues, the Termites bellicosi, as I find the naturalists call them, have made their way into the house! and having carried their galleries up the walls and along the roof, have come down in great force upon a trunk of clothes, which they would have destroyed entirely before night, had I not caught sight of them.
See! the whole ground is in motion. The bodies of the ais, though dead, are covered with living, moving objects! Ha! it is a "chacu" of the white ants. Leon now comprehended the whole affair. The ground was literally alive with the terrible termites.
Incredulity has made great progress since the time of the conquest; and it was only on the back of the Cordilleras that I found a small chapel, destined, according to its inscription, for prayers to be addressed to Heaven for the destruction of the termites.
Enormous as are the trees of the Amazonian forests, and able to withstand the fiercest storms, they have frequently to succumb to the attacks of minute insects. Many a monarch of the woods has been brought low by the efforts of the persevering termites; but they have other enemies. One of these is an enormous fellow the hister maximus.
Jim swung his improvised club in another terrific arc.... Denny darted around behind the ponderously wheeling bulk of the last remaining guard to the team of worker termites. He, too, swung his arms high over the bloated brain-bag that cowered down between the backs that bore it leaping here and there to avoid the blunt mandibles of the burden bearers.
Insects are extremely numerous, of a nondescript species, and exceedingly beautiful: the most singular are termites, destructive to houses and fences built of wood; ants, causing ruin to provisions; cockroaches and crickets, destroying leather, linen, and clothes; musquitos, sand-flies, centipedes, scorpions; and wild bees, which are very productive of honey.
A dense mass of underwood springs up; creepers innumerable hang from the boughs; countless multitudes of insects have been called into existence termites, ants, and beetles feeding on the leaves and herbage, and on the giant trunks themselves. It might seem, numerous and voracious as they are, that they must quickly destroy the clothing of verdure which covers the soil.
The cockroaches of the carboniferous epoch are exceedingly similar to those which now run about our coal-cellars; and its locusts, termites and dragon-flies are closely allied to the members of the same groups which now chirrup about our fields, undermine our houses, or sail with swift grace about the banks of our sedgy pools.
In their earlier stages the termites proceed with such energetic rapidity, that I have seen a pinnacle of moist clay, six inches in height and twice as large in diameter, constructed underneath a table between sitting down to dinner and the removal of the cloth.
Otherwise the joists will be eaten, the floors eaten, even the furniture eaten, and one day everything that is made of wood in the house will collapse. All the mischief, too, will have been concealed until the last moment. A wooden beam will look to be quite sound when really its whole heart has been eaten out by the termites.
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