Ants and Their Ways: With Illustrations, and an Appendix Giving a Complete List of Genera and Species of the British Ants

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Religious Tract Society, 1895 - 255 pages

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Page 96 - Go to the Ant, thou Sluggard, consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.
Page 98 - There be four things which are little upon the earth, but they are exceeding wise: the ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the summer; the conies are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks; the locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands; the spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings
Page 224 - The Lord of all, himself through all diffused, Sustains, and is the life of all that lives. Nature is but a name for an effect, Whose cause is God.
Page 8 - The works of the LORD are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.
Page 213 - These ants form a most efficient standing army for the plant, which prevents not only the mammalia from browsing on the leaves, but delivers it from the attacks of a much more dangerous enemy—the leaf-cutting ants. For these services the ants are not only securely housed by the plant, but are provided with a bountiful supply of food...
Page 213 - ANTS. 219 burrow through the partition that separates the two horns ; so that the one entrance serves for both. Here they rear their young, and in the wet season every one of the thorns is tenanted ; and hundreds of ants are to be seen running about, especially over the young leaves. If one of these be touched, or a branch shaken, the little ants (Pseudomyrma bicolor, Guer.) swarm out from the hollow thorns, and attack the aggressor with jaws and sting.
Page 214 - ... crater-formed gland which, when the leaves are young, secretes a honey-like liquid. Of this the ants are very fond, and they are constantly running about from one gland to another, to sip up the honey as it is secreted. But this is not all ; there is a still more wonderful provision of more solid food. At the end of each of the small divisions of the compound leaflet...
Page 181 - At length they approached a nest, inhabited by dark ash-coloured ants, the dome of which rose above the grass, at a distance of twenty feet from the hedge. Some of its inhabitants were guarding the entrance ; but, on the discovery of an approaching army, darted forth upon the advanced guard. The alarm spread at the same moment in the interior, and their companions came forth in numbers from their underground residence. The...
Page 164 - To this some of the young aphides were brought by the ants. Shortly afterwards I observed on a plant of daisy, in the axils of the leaves, some small aphides, very much resembling those from my nest, though we had not actually traced them continuously. They seemed thriving, and remained stationary on the daisy. Moreover, whether they had sprung from the black eggs or not, the ants evidently valued them, for they built up a wall of earth round and over them. So things remained throughout the summer;...
Page 72 - Their heads are of the same size as those of class 2; but the front is clothed with hairs, instead of being polished, and they have in the middle of the forehead a twin ocellus, or simple eye, of quite different structure from the ordinary compound eyes, on the sides of the head. This frontal eye is totally wanting in the other workers, and is not known in any other kind of ant. The apparition of these strange creatures from the cavernous depths of the mine reminded me, when I first observed them,...

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