Like ants, the termites, or white ants, have many enemies, but all of these, save one (at least in Africa) are content to seek them after they have issued from their stronghold. Innumerable birds make prey of the males and females, during their marriage flight, fowls leap into the air to catch them, when flying low, whilst toads, frogs, lizards, and some of the smaller insect-eating mammals show their appreciation of their soft, succulent bodies, whenever they alight on the ground. But one large, strange creature there is that, specialised for their destruction, assaults them in their fortress, and lives almost wholly upon them. This is the aard vark, or earth-hog, as the Boers of South Africa call him, an uncouth, naked-looking animal about the size of a pig, with tremendous claws, great, muscular, bowed fore legs, a proboscis-like snout, and long, narrow ears like a donkey’s. This gargoyle-like creature lies hidden during the day, as though shunning, then, to reveal itself; but when semi-darkness, by giving new, weird shapes to familiar objects, has made earth more in harmony with its portentous appearance, it issues forth and proceeds, in course of time, to an inhabited termite mound. Jumping up against this—now, perhaps, in the pale moonlight—it digs its curved claws into the hard, baked crust, and bowing in its strong forearms with a mighty effort, tears a hole in the nest’s side, and lays bare its interior. The indignant and ever-valiant soldiers rush out through the ruins, prepared to grapple with any foe of any shape. But the gristly snout and thick, hard skin, though but scantily clothed with coarse hair, are impervious to all their attacks, whilst from the tubular mouth is shot forth constantly, and withdrawn again, a long, thin, worm-like object, which, licking amidst the wreck of halls and galleries, sweeps thousands back with it, in each retreat. By morning the once proud edifice may be a mere shell, from which the destroyer, filled to satiety with its whilom inhabitants, now walks slowly away, to lie asleep and digesting them, till the following evening calls him to another meal.