Ants and their ways

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Religious Tract Society, 1883 - 279 pages

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Page 92 - 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 94 - 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 239 - 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 66 - I think they serve, in some sort, as passive instruments of protection to the real workers. Their enormously large, hard and indestructible heads may be of use in protecting them against the attacks of insectivorous animals. They would be, on this view, a kind of "pieces de resistance" serving as a foil against onslaughts made on the main body of workers.
Page vii - The works of the LORD are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.
Page 226 - 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 137 - I have noticed in one of my formicaria a subterranean cemetery, where I have seen some ants burying their dead by placing earth above them. One ant was evidently much affected, and tried to exhume the bodies ; but the united exertions of the yellow sextons were more than sufficient to neutralise the effort of the disconsolate mourner
Page 226 - 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 191 - 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 66 - 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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