They remove them to the centre of the city, and establish them in the saloon on which all the apartments and corridors abut. There they are revived, recruited, and nourished day and night; and the female gradually assumes an enormous size, until in body and stomach she is two thousand times larger than her natural condition,--though, by a hideous contrast, the head does not increase. For the rest, immovable, and therefore captive, the doors through which she entered have become infinitely too narrow to admit of the egress of such a monster. Accordingly, there she will remain, pouring out, until she splits asunder, that torrent of living matter which the termites day and night collect, and which, to-morrow, will be the People. This soft and whitish-looking creature, a stomach rather than a being, is at least of the size of the human thumb: a traveller pretends to have seen one as large as a crab. The bigger she is, the more fertile, the more inexhaustible, this terrible mother of lice seems the more enthusiastically worshipped by her fanatical vermin. She appears to be their ideal, their poetry, their ecstasy. If you carry them off, with a fragment, a ruin of the city, you may see them, under a glass shade, instantly set to work to build an arch for the protection of the mother's venerated head, to reconstruct her royal hall, which will become, if the materials be sufficient, the centre and basis of the resuscitated community. I am not astonished, let me add, at the extravagant love which they show towards this instrument of fecundity. If every other race did not jointly labour to destroy them, this truly prodigious mother would make them masters of the world,--nay, what do I say?--its only inhabitants. The fish alone would survive; but the insect world would perish. It suffices to remember that the queen-bee takes a year to accomplish what the termite mother accomplishes in a day. Through her means they would swallow up Everybody; but they are feeble and savoury, and it is Everybody which swallows up them. When the species of termites which live and dwell in the woods unfortunately approach near our habitations, there is no means of arresting their ravages. They work with a truly incredible vigour and rapidity. They have been known in one night to eat their way through the leg of a table, then through the thickness of the table itself, descending through the leg on the opposite side. The reader can easily imagine the effect produced by such toil as this on the joists and framework of a house. The worst of it is, that a long time may elapse before their ravages are detected. We continue to rely upon supports which suddenly, one fine morning, crumble away; we sleep peacefully under roofs which to-morrow will cease to exist. The town of Valencia, in New Grenada, undermined by the subterranean galleries these insects have excavated in the earth, is now literally suspended upon their dangerous catacombs.