asons of droughts as well as after rain; in the driest and least
promising positions, in situations inaccessible to drainage from above,
and cut off by rocks and impervious strata from springs from below. Dr.
Livingstone, struck with this phenomenon in Southern Africa, asks: "Can
the white ants possess the power of combining the oxygen and hydrogen of
their vegetable food by vital force so as to form water?"--_Travels_, p.
22. And he describes at Angola an insect (A. goudotti? Bennett.)
resembling the _Aphrophora spumaria_; seven or eight individuals of
which distil several pints of water every night.--P. 414. It is highly
probable that the termites are endowed with some such faculty: nor is it
more remarkable that an insect should combine the gases of its food to
produce water, than that a fish should decompose water in order to
provide itself with gas. FOURCROIX found the contents of the air-bladder
in a carp to be pure nitrogen.--_Yarrell_, vol. i. p. 42. And the
aquatic larva of the dragon-fly extracts air for its respiration from
the water in which it is submerged. A similar mystery pervades the
inquiry whence plants under peculiar circumstances derive the water
essential to vegetation.]

[Footnote 2: KNOX'S _Ceylon_, Part I, ch. vi. p. 24.]

[Footnote 3: Dr. HOOKER, in his _Himalayan Journal_ (vol. i. p. 20) is
of opinion that the nests of the termites are not independent
structures, but that their nucleus is "the debris of clumps of bamboos
or the trunks of large trees which these insects have destroyed." He
supposes that the dead tree falls leaving the stump coated with sand,
_which the action of the weather soon fashions info a cone_. But
independently of the fact that the "action of the weather" produces
little or no effect on the closely cemented clay of the white ants'
nest, they may be daily seen constructing their edifices in the very
form of a cone, which they ever after retain. Besides which, they appear
in the midst of terraces and fields where no trees are to be seen; and
Dr. Hooker seems to overlook the fact that the termites rarely attack a
living tree; and although their nests may be built against one, it
continues to flourish not the less for their presence.]

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