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LEPISMAS AT WORK.

How Books are Destroyed.

Perhaps not more than a half-dozen species of Lepisma are known to exist in this country. Our commonest form is very abundant in the Middle States under stones and leaves in forests, and northward in damp houses, where it has much of the habits of the cockroach, eating clothes, tapestry, silken trimmings of furniture, and doing great mischief to libraries by devouring the paste and mutilating the leaves and covers of books. Our heat-loving form, which is apparently allied to the Lepisma thermophila of Europe, and which may be an imported species, is quite as destructive as its nearest of kin Lepisma saccharina. It does not confine its ravages to closets and pantries, and feed upon sugar and cake and pastry, but has latterly taken to bookcases, where it leads an easy, comfortable life, without fear of molestation.

So delicately constructed are the Lepismas, and so seemingly feeble the breath of life which animates their frail houses of clay, that nature has endowed them with qualities of mind and body which eminently fit them for the part they have to play in the world. She has made them lovers of darkness rather than light, endowed them with keenness of vision and hearing truly wonderful, and given them a celerity of movement which enables them to outstrip in speed the fleetest of their insect-enemies, and even to baffle the well-directed efforts of man for their destruction. The silver-coated armor with which they are invested is so glossy and smooth that they can slip into a crevice in the wall or floor with the utmost ease and facility. From their actions it would seem that they were always on the alert, for when peril is imminent they do not run aimlessly about for a place of security, but know just where to find it with the least possible expenditure of time and physical strength. Every nook and cranny of their appropriated domain is as well known to these very humble of God’s creatures as some forest-tract of country to one skilled in wood-craft. Never have I studied the behavior of Lepisma that I have not been deeply impressed with the intelligence of its actions. There have always been displayed a purpose and an aim, which showed as plainly as could be that no blind instinct was the cause of a conduct so rational and human-like.