. The bird. Birds. ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 319 of which they relieve him—man would have remained the miserable slave of his feeble organization. Borne down by the habitual dispro portion of weight and strength, either he would have abandoned labour, have lived upon chance victims, without art or progress; or, rather, he would have lived earth's everlasting porter—crooked, dragging, and drawing, with sunken head, never gazing on the sky, never thinking, never raising himself to the heights of Page 132. On the poiver of insects.—-It is not only in the Tropical world that they are formida
. The bird. Birds. ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 319 of which they relieve him—man would have remained the miserable slave of his feeble organization. Borne down by the habitual dispro portion of weight and strength, either he would have abandoned labour, have lived upon chance victims, without art or progress; or, rather, he would have lived earth's everlasting porter—crooked, dragging, and drawing, with sunken head, never gazing on the sky, never thinking, never raising himself to the heights of Page 132. On the poiver of insects.—-It is not only in the Tropical world that they are formidable ; at the commencement of the last ceMury half Holland perished because the piles which strengthen its dykes simultaneously gave way, invisibly undermined by a worm named the taret. This redoubtable nibbler, which is often a foot in length, never betrays itself; it only works within. One morning the beam breaks, the framework yields, the ship engulfed founders in the waves. How shall we reach, how discover it ? A bird knows it—the lapwing, the guardian of Holland. And it is thus a notable impru- dence to destroy, as has been done, his eggs. (Quatrefages, Souvenirs d'un Katiiraliste.) France, for more than a centuiy, has suffered from the impor- tation of a monster not less terrible—the termite, which devours dry wood just as the taret consumes wet wood. The single female of each swarm has the honible fecundity of laying daily eighty thousand eggs. La Rochelle begins to fear the fate of that American city which is suspended in the air, the termites having devoured all its foundations, and excavated immense cata- combs Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced for readability - coloration and appearance of these illustrations may not perfectly resemble the original Michelet, Jules, 1798-1874; Giacomelli, Hector, 1822-1904. London ; New York : T. Nelson
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Keywords: ., bookauthormich, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1860, booksubjectbirds
