Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. George P. Marsh
transported to California, where it was previously unknown. The Italian stingless bee has very lately been introduced into the United States.
The insects and worms intentionally transplanted by man bear but a small proportion to those accidentally introduced by him. Plants and animals often carry their parasites with them, and the traffic of commercial countries, which exchange their products with every zone and every stage of social existence, cannot fail to transfer in both directions the minute organisms that are, in one way or another, associated with almost every object important to the material interests of man.[90]
The tenacity of life possessed by many insects, their prodigious fecundity, the length of time they often remain in the different phases of their existence,[91] the security of the retreats into which their small dimensions enable them to retire, are all circumstances very favorable not only to the perpetuity of their species, but to their transportation to distant climates and their multiplication in their new homes. The teredo, so destructive to shipping, has been carried by the vessels whose wooden walls it mines to almost every part of the globe. The termite, or white ant, is said to have been brought to Rochefort by the commerce of that port a hundred years ago.[92] 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.
The carnivorous, and often the herbivorous insects render an important service to man by consuming dead and decaying animal and vegetable matter, the decomposition of which would otherwise fill the air with effluvia noxious to health. Some of them, the grave-digger beetle, for instance, bury the small animals in which they lay their eggs, and thereby prevent the escape of the gases disengaged by putrefaction. The prodigious rapidity of development in insect life, the great numbers of the individuals in many species, and the voracity of most of them while in the larva state, justify the appellation of nature's scavengers which has been bestowed upon them, and there is very little doubt that, in warm countries, they consume a much larger quantity of putrescent organic material than the quadrupeds and the birds which feed upon such aliment.
Destruction of Insects.
It is well known to naturalists, but less familiarly to common observers, that the aquatic larvæ of some insects constitute, at certain seasons, a large part of the food of fresh-water fish, while other larvæ, in their turn, prey upon the spawn and even the young of their persecutors.[93] The larvæ of the mosquito and the gnat are the favorite food of the trout in the wooded regions where those insects abound.[94] Earlier in the year the trout feeds on the larvæ of the May fly, which is itself very destructive to the spawn of the salmon, and hence, by a sort of house-that-Jack-built, the destruction of the mosquito, that feeds the trout that preys on the May fly that destroys the eggs that hatch the salmon that pampers the epicure, may occasion a scarcity of this latter fish in waters where he would otherwise be abundant. Thus all nature is linked together by invisible bonds, and every organic creature, however low, however feeble, however dependent, is necessary to the well-being of some other among the myriad forms of life with which the Creator has peopled the earth.
I have said that man has promoted the increase of the insect and the worm, by destroying the bird and the fish which feed upon them. Many insects, in the four different stages of their growth, inhabit in succession the earth, the water, and the air. In each of these elements they have their special enemies, and, deep and dark as are the minute recesses in which they hide themselves, they are pursued to the remotest, obscurest corners by the executioners that nature has appointed to punish their delinquencies, and furnished with cunning contrivances for ferreting out the offenders and dragging them into the light of day. One tribe of birds, the woodpeckers, seems to depend for subsistence almost wholly on those insects which breed in dead or dying trees, and it is, perhaps, needless to say that the injury these birds do the forest is imaginary. They do not cut holes in the trunk of the tree to prepare a lodgment for a future colony of boring larvæ, but to extract the worm which has already begun his mining labors. Hence these birds are not found where the forester removes trees as fast as they become fit habitations for such insects. In clearing new lands in the United States, dead trees, especially of the spike-leaved kinds, too much decayed to serve for timber, and which, in that state, are worth little for fuel, are often allowed to stand until they fall of themselves. Such stubs, as they are popularly called, are filled with borers, and often deeply cut by the woodpeckers, whose strong bills enable them to penetrate to the very heart of the tree and drag out the lurking larvæ. After a few years, the stubs fall, or, as wood becomes valuable, are cut and carried off for firewood, and, at the same time, the farmer selects for felling, in the forest he has reserved as a permanent source of supply of fuel and timber, the decaying trees which, like the dead stems in the fields, serve as a home for both the worm and his pursuer. We thus gradually extirpate this tribe of insects, and, with them, the species of birds which subsist principally upon them. Thus the fine, large, red-headed woodpecker, Picus erythrocephalus, formerly very common in New England, has almost entirely disappeared from those States, since the dead trees are gone, and the apples, his favorite vegetable food, are less abundant.
There are even large quadrupeds which feed almost exclusively upon insects. The ant bear is strong enough to pull down the clay houses built by the species of termites that constitute his ordinary diet, and the curious ai-ai, a climbing quadruped of Madagascar—of which I believe only a single specimen, secured by Mr. Sandwith, has yet reached Europe—is provided with a very slender, hook-nailed finger, long enough to reach far into a hole in the trunk of a tree, and extract the worm which bored it.
Reptiles.
But perhaps the most formidable foes of the insect, and even of the small rodents, are the reptiles. The chameleon approaches the insect perched upon the twig of a tree, with an almost imperceptible slowness of motion, until, at the distance of a foot, he shoots out his long, slimy tongue, and rarely fails to secure the victim. Even the slow toad catches the swift and wary housefly in the same manner; and in the warm countries of Europe, the numerous lizards contribute very essentially to the reduction of the insect population, which they both surprise in the winged state upon walls and trees, and consume as egg, worm, and chrysalis, in their earlier metamorphoses. The serpents feed much upon insects, as well as upon mice, moles, and small reptiles, including also other snakes. The disgust and fear with which the serpent is so universally regarded expose him to constant persecution by man, and perhaps no other animal is so relentlessly sacrificed by him. In temperate climates, snakes are consumed by scarcely any beast or bird of prey except the stork, and they have few dangerous enemies but man, though in the tropics other animals prey upon them.[95] It is doubtful whether any species of serpent has been exterminated within the human period, and even the dense population of China has not been able completely to rid itself of the viper. They have, however, almost entirely disappeared from particular localities. The rattlesnake is now wholly unknown in many large districts where it was extremely common half a century ago, and Palestine has long been, if not absolutely free from venomous serpents, at least very nearly so.[96]
Destruction of Fish.
The inhabitants of the waters seem comparatively secure from human pursuit or interference by the inaccessibility of their retreats, and by our ignorance of their habits—a natural result of the difficulty of observing the ways of creatures living in a medium in which we cannot exist. Human agency has, nevertheless, both directly and incidentally, produced great changes in the population of the sea, the lakes, and the rivers, and if the effects of such revolutions in aquatic life are apparently of small importance in general geography, they are still not wholly inappreciable. The