The white ant has lately appeared at St. Helena and is in a high degree destructive, no wood but teak, and even that not always, resisting it.--Nature for March 2d, 1871, p. 362.] This creature is more injurious to wooden structures and implements than any other known insect. It eats out almost the entire substance of the wood, leaving only thin partitions between the galleries it excavates in it; but as it never gnaws through the surface to the air, a stick of timber may be almost wholly consumed without showing any external sign of the damage it has sustained. The termite is found also in other parts of France, and particularly at Rochelle, where, thus far, its ravages are confined to a single quarter of the city. A borer, of similar habits, is not uncommon in Italy, and you may see in that country handsome chairs and other furniture which have been reduced by this insect to a framework of powder of post, covered, and apparently held together, by nothing but the varnish. DESTRUCTION OF INSECTS. It is well known to naturalists, but less familiarly to common observers, that the aquatic larvae of some insects which in other stages of their existence inhabit the land, constitute, at certain seasons, a large part of the food of fresh-water fish, while other larvae, in their turn, prey upon the spawn and even the young of their persecutors. [Footnote: I have seen the larva of the dragon-fly in an aquarium bite off the head of a young fish as long as itself.] The larvae of the mosquito and the gnat are the favorite food of the trout in the wooded regions where those insects abound. [Footnote: Insects and fish--which prey upon and feed each other--are the only forms of animal life that are numerous in the native woods, and their range is, of course, limited by the extent of the waters. The great abundance of the trout, and of other more or less allied genera in the lakes of Lapland, seems to be due to the supply of food provided for them by the swarms of insects which in the larva state inhabit the waters, or, in other stages of their life, are accidentally swept into them. All travellers in the north of Europe speak of the gnat and the mosquito as very serious drawbacks upon the enjoyments of the summer tourist, who visits the head of the Gulf of Bothnia to see the midnight sun, and the brothers Laestadius regard them as one of the great plagues of sub-arctic life. "The persecutions of these insects," says Lars Levi Laestadius [Culex pipiens, Culex reptans, and Culex pulicaris], "leave not a moment's peace, by day or night, to any living creature. Not only man, but cattle, and even birds and wild beasts, suffer intolerably from their bite." He adds in a note, "I will not affirm that they have ever devoured a living man, but many young cattle, such as lambs and calves, have been worried out of their lives by them. All the people of Lapland declare that young birds are killed by them, and this is not improbable,