[Footnote 1:  It becomes an interesting question whence the termites derive the large supplies of moisture with which they not only temper the clay for the construction of their long covered ways above ground, but for keeping their passages uniformly damp and cool below the surface.  Yet their habits in this particular are unvarying, in the seasons of droughts as well as after rain; in the driest and least promising positions, in situations inaccessible to drainage from above, and cut off by rocks and impervious strata from springs from below.  Dr. Livingstone, struck with this phenomenon in Southern Africa, asks:  “Can the white ants possess the power of combining the oxygen and hydrogen of their vegetable food by vital force so as to form water?”—­Travels, p. 22.  And he describes at Angola, an insect[A] resembling the Aphrophora spumaria; seven or eight individuals of which distil several pints of water every night.—­P. 414.  It is highly probable that the termites are endowed with some such faculty:  nor is it more remarkable that an insect should combine the gases of its food to produce water, than that a fish should decompose water in order to provide itself with gas.  FOURCROIX found the contents of the air-bladder in a carp to be pure nitrogen.—­Yarrell, vol. i. p. 42.  And the aquatic larva of the dragon-fly extracts air for its respiration from the water in which it is submerged.  A similar mystery pervades the inquiry whence plants under peculiar circumstances derive the water essential to vegetation.]

[Footnote A:  A. goudotti? Bennett.]

[Footnote 2:  KNOX’S Ceylon, Part i, ch. vi, p.24.]

[Footnote 3:  Dr. HOOKER, in his Himalayan Journal (vol. i. p. 20) is of opinion that the nests of the termites are not independent structures, but that their nucleus is “the debris of clumps of bamboos or the trunks of large trees which these insects have destroyed.”  He supposes that the dead tree falls leaving the stump coated with sand, which the action of the weather soon fashions into a cone.  But independently of the fact that the “action of the weather” produces little or no effect on the closely cemented clay of the white ants’ nest, they may be daily seen constructing their edifices in the very form of a cone, which they ever after retain.  Besides which, they appear in the midst of terraces and fields where no trees are to be seen:  and Dr. Hooker seems to overlook the fact that the termites rarely attack a living tree; and although their nests may be built against one, it continues to flourish not the less for their presence.]