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Ant   /ænt/   Listen
Ant

noun
1.
Social insect living in organized colonies; characteristically the males and fertile queen have wings during breeding season; wingless sterile females are the workers.  Synonyms: emmet, pismire.



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"Ant" Quotes from Famous Books



... I wish you'd jest let folks know who hosy's father is, cos my ant Keziah used to say it's nater to be curus ses she, she aint livin though and he's a ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell

... his plough subdues the land, The soldier stout, the vintner sly and bland, The venturous sons of ocean, all declare That with one view the toils of life they bear, When age has come, and labour has amassed Enough to live on, to retire at last: E'en so the ant (for no bad pattern she), That tiny type of giant industry, Drags grain by grain, and adds it to the sum Of her full heap, foreseeing cold to come: Yet she, when winter turns the year to chill, Stirs not an inch beyond her mounded hill, But lives upon her savings: ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... balance even? He must indeed be a critic, and an exquisite critic, in the embodiment of his own dream, the technique of his own verse. But do not expect him to be a critic outside his own work. Do not expect to find the bee an authority on ant-hills or the ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... the land of the Zulus suffer such a noise? Never! lest the cattle miscarry. To it, ye black ones! There lies the girl. She is asleep and helpless. Kill her! What? you hesitate? Nay, then, if you will have time for thought, I give it. Take these men, smear them with honey, and pin them over ant-heaps; by to-morrow's sun they will know their own minds. But first kill these two hunted jackals," and he pointed to Baleka and myself. "They seem tired and doubtless they ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard

... can be dealt with, but the boll weevil is a serious menace to the cotton crop. It is a Central American insect that has become acclimated in Texas and has done great damage. A scientist of the Department of Agriculture has found the weevil at home in Guatemala being kept in check by an ant, which has been brought to our cotton fields for observation. It is hoped that it may serve a ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... and the wall of breaking seas upon the reef, and the palms upon the islet, already trembled in the heat. A French man-of-war was going out, homeward bound; she lay in the middle distance of the port, an ant heap for activity. In the night a schooner had come in, and now lay far out, hard by the passage; and the yellow flag, the emblem of pestilence, flew on her. From up the coast, a long procession of canoes headed ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... X. 96). This secular ignorance is not surprising; but the silence of Josephus is. He mentions Jesus in but one clearly genuine passage, when telling of the martyrdom of James, the "brother of Jesus, who is called the Christ" (Ant. xx. 9. 1). Of John the Baptist, however, he has a very appreciative notice (Ant, xviii. 5. 2), and it cannot be that he was ignorant of Jesus. His appreciation of John suggests that he could not have mentioned Jesus more fully without some approval of his life and teaching. This would be ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees

... are turning out from their bivouacs. They move stiffly from their wet rest, and hurry to and fro like ants in an ant-hill. The tens of thousands of moving specks are largely of a brick-red colour, but the foreign contingent ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... the Southern States during that time; their remains have been found as far north as the Salt Lick in Kentucky. But we must not judge of the Tertiary Edentata by any now known to us. The Sloths, the Armadillos, the Ant-Eaters, the Pangolins, are all animals of rather small size; but formerly they were represented by the gigantic Megatherium, the Megalonyx, and the Mylodon, some of which were larger than the Elephant, and others about the same size of the Rhinoceros or Hippopotamus. The subjoined wood-cut represents ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... of the steaming mud, the decaying vegetation, and the nameless evils hidden deeper in this water-rotted land was an added torment. The boy shook a large red ant from its grip in the flesh of his hand and wiped the streaming perspiration ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton

... know," said Christopher, in a voice which had grown spiritless. Then after an instant in which he stared blankly down at Tucker's ant-hill, he turned hurriedly away and followed the little straggling path ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... dignity, the silly notions of great and mean, by which fashion distorts God's real proportions; is utterly delivered from the spirit of contempt; and, in consulting for the benign administration of life, will learn many a truth, and discharge many ant office, from which lesser beings, esteeming themselves greater, would shrink from as ignoble. But in truth, nothing is degrading which a high and graceful purpose ennobles; and offices the most menial cease to be menial, the moment they are wrought in love. ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur

... I was a monstrous ant, and had been digging myself a burrow in the soft fresh earth. The dream was intensely real, and when I awoke, I felt as tired as if I had actually been digging. My arms ached, and I was astonished, upon examining my hands, to ...
— The Bell Tone • Edmund H. Leftwich

... enough," struck in the clerk; "and I mind their being married, becos' we wor ringing of the bells, when old Mason Parmiter run into the church, and says: 'Do'ant-'ee, boys—do'ant-'ee ring 'em any more. These yere old tower'll never stand it. I see him rock,' he says, 'and the dust a-running out of the cracks like rain.' So out we come, and glad enough to stop it, too, because there wos a feast down in the meadows by the London Road, and drinks and ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner

... infest our wooded lands. The "punkeys" and "midgets" can outstrip them for voracity and the painful character of the wound which they inflict. The "punkey," or "black-fly," as it is called, is a small, black gnat, about the size of a garden ant, and the bite of the insect often results very seriously. The midget is a minute little creature, and is the most everlastingly sticky and exasperating pest in the catalogue of human torments. They fly in swarms of thousands, and go for their victim "en masse" ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson

... with a curb of fescue-grass intertwined with silk. You can see the eyes of the mighty Spider gleam at the bottom of the den like little diamonds, an object of terror to most. What a prey and what dangerous hunting for the Pompilus! And here, on a hot summer afternoon, is the Amazon-ant, who leaves her barrack-rooms in long battalions and marches far afield to hunt for slaves. We will follow her in her raids when we find time. Here again, around a heap of grasses turned to mould, are Scoliae (Large Hunting-wasps—Translator's Note.) an inch and a half long, who fly gracefully ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... possessed of as great vitality in their line as the African people. The white ant was imported accidentally into St. Helena from the coast of Guinea, and has committed such ravages in the town of St. James, that numerous people have been ruined, and the governor calls out for aid against them. In other so-called new countries ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone

... to bring in Socialism at large. A tendency so stupid and so selfish is like to prove invincible; and if Socialism be at all a practicable rule of life, there is every chance that our grand-children will see the day and taste the pleasures of existence in something far liker an ant-heap than any previous human polity. And this not in the least because of the voice of Mr. Hyndman or the horns of his followers; but by the mere glacier movement of the political soil, bearing forward on its bosom, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the parlor chairs, those that she had loved as a little child; the fox and the stork, the fox and the crow, the ant and the grasshopper, and the ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... automatically shooting to kill as they were trained to do, even as a man pulls with all his might in the crucial test of a tug of war. Old Corporal Christy, bear-hunter of the North-West, who could "shoot the eye off an ant," as Niven said, leaned out over the parapet, or what was left of it, because he could take better aim lying down and the Germans were so thick that he could not ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... ANT. Why, hath not Creon, in the burial-rite, Of our two brethren honoured one, and wrought On one foul wrong? Eteocles, they tell, With lawful consecration he lays out, And after covers him in earth, adorned With amplest honours in the world below. But Polynices, ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles

... creation humanity is, then!" said Santoris, with a smile—"How astonishing that it should exist at all for no higher aims than those of the ant or the mouse! My dear Harland, if your beliefs were really sound we should be bound in common duty and charity to stop the population of the world altogether—for the whole business is useless. Useless and even cruel, for it is nothing but a crime to allow people to be born for no other end than ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... leagues at the most. Look!" he said. "You are not an ignoramus like some I have met; nor if I read you right are you like others who not knowing that True Religion is True Wonder up with hands and cry, 'Blasphemy, Sacrilege and Contradiction!' Earth and water make an orb. Place ant on apple and see that orbs may be gone around! Travel far enough and east and west change names! Straight through, beneath us, are ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston

... 1,200 yards from the enemy's positions, being there well within rifle range, the line halted, lay down, and opened fire. The smooth surface of the ground gave little natural shelter; what {p.053} there was was found chiefly behind ant hills, of which there were very many. The musketry fire here undergone was severe, for the only diversion to it continued so far to be the British artillery, the flanking movement not having yet fully ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan

... forged evidence of Paul before interruption. The lads gained great credit with all for their gallantry, and Katinka said, laughing, "It is wrong to say so, I suppose, now he is dead, but I should like to have seen the count struggling as Jack carried him along, like a little ant with a great ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty

... being a worry to her? Before I'd been there a week I'd be spending most of my time down at the track or the stables; I could no more keep away from the horses than I could from a square game, and she hates both,—they swamped my father before I knew an ace from an ant-hill. No, sir! The more I think of it the more I know the only place for me is right here with the old regiment. What's more, the livelier work we have in the field and the less we get of garrison grind the better it is for me. I almost wish we ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King

... of an ant, deceived Eurymedusa, the daughter of Cleitos. Her son was for this reason called Myrmidon (from {myrmex}, an ant), and was regarded as the ancestor of ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... their places above the zooephytes. Only within the main-types, in the classes, orders, etc., do differences in rank take effect; and even here, not without exception. What difference in rank, for instance, is there between an oyster and a cuttle-fish? between a cochineal and a bee or ant? and yet the first two belong to one and the same type—the type of mollusca; and the last three to one and the same class—the class of insects. The vertebrates rank decidedly above the invertebrates; and in a manner wholly corresponding to this, the vertebrates also ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid

... Simocyonidae intermediate between bears and wolves; the genus Hyaenictis which connects the hyaenas with the civets; the Ancylotherium, which is allied both to the extinct mastodon and to the living pangolin or scaly ant-eater; and the Helladotherium, which connects the now isolated giraffe ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... larger congener. Bovista nigrescens, Fr., and Bovista plumbea, Fr., are also eaten in the United States. More than one species of Lycoperdon and Bovista appear in the bazaars of India, as at Secunderabad and Rangoon; while the white ant-hills, together with an excellent Agaric, produce one or more species of Podaxon which are esculent when young. A species of Scleroderma which grows abundantly in sandy districts, is substituted for truffles in Perigord pies, of which, however, it ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... "but our boy shall not go to live in an ant-hill. If you know of nothing better, we will give the commission to the white gnats; they fly about in rain and sunshine; they know the burdock wood from ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... far, they have few or no political rights. An ant doesn't have the vote, apparently: he ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day

... assuming that the human reason is the final test of all things. What right have you to assume that? Suppose you were an ant. You would take your ant's reason as the final test, wouldn't you? Would that be the truth?" And a smile had fixed itself on his lips above ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... specimen, in all respects entire, was found in 1801, preserved in ice, in Siberia. We are more surprised by finding such gigantic proportions in an animal called the megatherium, which ranks in an order now assuming much humbler forms—the edentata—to which the sloth, ant-eater, and armadillo belong. The megatherium had a skeleton of enormous solidity, with an armour-clad body, and five toes, terminating in huge claws, wherewith to grasp the branches, from which, like its existing congener, the sloth, it derived its food. The megalonyx ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers

... thither of the butterflies. He mingles with the sweet joys of the creatures, and learns a changeless faith in some secret and infinite goodness. The green glades are his chosen dwelling and his life is April; he reclines amazed at the mysteries of a tuft of grass; he studies the ant-hills of tiny republicans; he learns to know the birds by their songs; he watches the children playing barefoot in the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... obliged to borrow the perambulator for the conveyance of leaves and branches with which to build a bower withal; and Theodora, having been established in unfortunate proximity to an ant hill, was thoroughly explored by its inhabitants ere her ministering sister realized that her cries and agitation were anything more than her usual attitude of protest against whatever chanced to be going on. By the time the bower was finished and the perambulator ready for its customary ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly

... back with his trunk, he resumes the path to his forest solitudes. Having reached a secluded spot, I have remarked that full-grown bulls lie down on their broad-sides, about the hour of midnight, and sleep for a few hours. The spot which they usually select is an ant-hill, and they lie around it with their backs resting against it; these hills, formed by the white ants, are from thirty to forty feet in diameter at their base. The mark of the under tusk is always deeply imprinted in the ground, proving that they lie upon their sides. I never remarked ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester

... the vast level, something that looks hardly so large on the plain as an ant on the floor, is moving this way across it. This is what the cure and his friend are watching. Open in the cure's hand, as if he had just read it aloud again, is that last letter of Bonaventure's, sent ahead of ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable

... to apply for leave: One day Langley was strolling about just outside the lines, looking for somebody to talk to, when he noticed an apparently very old native man sitting on an ant-heap and regarding him somewhat intently. This old native had been several times seen in the vicinity of the camp, but he never seemed to speak to any one, and he looked so harmless that the police did not even trouble ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various

... to move with as much care as is needed in climbing a barbed-wire fence. When at night, camping out on the veldt, one gathers brushwood to light the cooking-fire, both the clothes and the hands of the novice come badly off. Huge ant-hills begin to appear, sometimes fifteen to twenty feet high and as many yards in circumference; but these large ones are all dead and may be of considerable age. In some places they are so high and steep, and stand so close together, that by joining them with an earthen rampart a strong fort ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce

... naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... an ant-heap. But I know you are right. For Lassalle the Fighter the world holds no wife. If I could only be sure that the victory will ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... foibles of literary men. They have been translated into many languages; into English by Rockliffe (3rd edition, 1866). The fable in question describes how, at a picnic of the animals, a discussion arose as to which of them carried off the palm for superiority of talent. The praises of the ant, the dog, the bee, and the parrot were sung in turn; but at last the ostrich stood up and declared for the dromedary. Whereupon the dromedary stood up and declared for the ostrich. No one could discover the reason for this mutual compliment. Was it because both ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer

... from sawdust and candle-ends, when necessary, and that is certainly what is needed nowadays. Also, she has launched a wonderful counter-offensive against the ants. There was a time when we ate our meals surrounded by a magic circle like Brunhilde, but ours was not of flames, but of ant powder. Not that they mind it much. I'm told that they rather dislike camphor, but do you know the present price of ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane

... limbers and water-carts, was a seething mass of humanity and mules. Few of the men spoke, beyond a welcoming "How do, cobber," or a "Glad you've come, mate." They appeared out of the darkness and passed into it again with an air of steady practical purpose. Ant-like, they passed in continual streams from barges to stacks of boxes, ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie

... to the 24th the Green Drake and Stone Fly, the Owl fly, the Barn fly, the purple Hackle, the purple Gold Hackle, the flesh Fly, the little flesh Fly, the Peacock fly, the Ant fly, the brown Gnat, the little black Gnat, the Green-Grasshopper, the ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett

... and be a good boy—and maybe we'll find them cubs yet," he conciliated. "You'd die a-laughing at the way they set up and scratch their ears when a big, black ant bites 'em, Buck. I'll show you in a little while. And there's a funny camp down here, too, where we ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower

... appears any thing of note. And yet one imprint many deal. But why, you and another book seller, you does not to imprint some good wooks? There is a reason for that, it is that you cannot to sell its. The actual-liking of the public is depraved they does not read who for to amuse one's self ant but to instruct one's. But the letter's men who cultivate the arts and the sciences they can't to pass without the books. A little learneds are happies enough for to may to satisfy their fancies on the literature. Have you found the Buff on who I had call for? I have only been able to procure the ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca

... Capt. Noah swept the sea with his glass, but in vain; the form of the poor Ant was nowhere ...
— The Cruise of the Noah's Ark • David Cory

... the handsome Red-headed birds on a fence. Down he drops to pick up an ant or a grasshopper from the ground; then up he shoots to catch a wasp or beetle in the air. Nor does he stop with fly-catching. Nutting—beech-nutting—is one of his favorite pastimes; while berries, fruits and seeds are all to his taste. If, in his appreciation of the good things that man ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various

... almond-trees were in bloom. The marble Diana had gazed hence for so many years, had seen so much that might make the dewy greenwood forgotten! It was mid-afternoon and flooding light. Here Rome basked, half-asleep in a dream of sense; here the ant city worked ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston

... a tiny bird, A shining speck at sleepy dawn, Forgets the ant-hill so absurd, This self-important Buffalo. Descending twenty miles away He bathes his wings at break of ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... mariners, and slaves, going to and fro with merchandise among the crowd of ships. And the heroes' hearts were humbled, and they looked at each other and said: "We thought ourselves a gallant crew when we sailed from Iolcos by the sea; but how small we look before this city, like an ant before a hive ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various

... for a moment deep in thought. It was a strange country, this,—a strange end which it seemed that he must prepare to face. He felt like the man who had gone out to shoot lions and returning with great spoil had died of the bite of a poisonous ant! ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... out of an ant-heap," said the old woman, vigorously. "No harm's done. You're a mighty slick girl, and these boys don't see many like you out here in the sage-brush and pinyons. Facts are, you're kind o' upsettin' to a feller like Roy. You make him kind ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... base, flanked by "Devil's Peak" and "Lion's Head," makes a majestic, natural frame to a beautiful landscape. This singular mountain, before whose noble proportions the works of man sink into insignificance,—his dwellings appearing, from its summit, mere ant-hills,—is 3,582 feet above the level of the ocean; and for one thousand or more feet from its top descends on the north-east side perpendicularly, whilst the flat appearance of its lengthened surface completes the resemblance to ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay

... point out that if life is crowned by its success and devotion in industrial organization and ingenuity, we had better worship the ant and the bee (as moralists urge us to do in our childhood), and humble ourselves before the arrogance of ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw

... Englishman named Jesse once put a small caterpillar near an ants' nest, and watched. Soon an ant seized it; but the caterpillar was too heavy to be moved by one ant alone, so away he ran until he met another ant. They stopped for a few moments, during which each tapped the other's head with his feelers in a very lively manner. Then ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... souls, To yield our Lord Jesus his proper rent; To spread his word is alle mine intent." "Now by your faith, O deare Sir," quoth she, "Chide him right well, for sainte charity. He is aye angry as is a pismire,* *ant Though that he have all that he can desire, Though I him wrie* at night, and make him warm, *cover And ov'r him lay my leg and eke mine arm, He groaneth as our boar that lies in sty: Other disport of him right none have I, I may not please him in no manner case." "O Thomas, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... quit. We have caught lice several times from the tourists, and tenderfeet but could always get rid of them other places by the cowboy method—At night take off your shirt turn it inside out spread it over an ant-hill, and in the morning the ants have all you company preserved for the ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis

... tried to annoy him in various ways into acquiescence. Among other of his tricks, he put about four hundred foxes, old and young, into Rose's park. It may be imagined what disorder this company made there, and the surprise of Rose and his servants at an inexhaustible ant-hill of foxes come to ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... breathless with the unusual exertion of climbing. You could see the church stair, as it was called, from nearly every part of the town, and the figures of the numerous climbers, diminished by distance, looked like a busy ant-hill, long before the bell began to ring for afternoon service. All who could manage it had put on a bit of black in token of mourning; it might be very little; an old ribbon, a rusty piece of crape; but some sign of mourning was shown ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... fauna of the Australian and Austro-Columbian provinces; but, seeing that not a trace of a Platyrrhine Ape, of a Procyonine Carnivore, of a characteristically South-American Rodent, of a Sloth, an Armadillo, or an Ant-eater has yet been found in Miocene deposits of Arctogaea, I cannot doubt that they already existed in the Miocene ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... took her turn with the other ladies in superintending the coffee-room. At length, however, as they passed one of those open stairways that lead to thronged tenements above,—like the entrance to a many-chambered ant-hill, save that this mounts and that descends,—she spoke to a lad on the sidewalk, telling him to give her love to his sister and say that she was coming in to see her the next day. To Millard she explained that the boy's sister ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston

... "I swear to God what my people swears, I deemed it no bigger than a fly, or a gnat, or an ant." ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various

... for him to die. I've lost heart, and death is over me. Death is close to me, and I know I have got to end. But think of all the hopes I had only a little time ago, the sense of fine beginnings!... It was all a sham. There were no beginnings.... We're just ants in ant-hill cities, in a world that doesn't matter; that goes on and rambles into nothingness. New York—New York doesn't even strike me as horrible. New York was nothing but an ant-hill kicked to pieces by ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... the wild flowers, making friendship with the dragon-fly, With the ant in her circling citadel, with the spider at her silk-loom, Talking to the babbling brook, speaking kindly to the uncouth terrapin, And frog, who to them seem'd dancing joyously in watery halls. Like the chirping of the wood-robin murmured their tuneful voices, Or rang out in merry laughter, gladdening ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney

... out an' begun to get married, an' us all sittin' lookin' on an' no more guessin' what was comin' next than a ant looks for a mornin' paper. The minister was gettin' most through an' the deacon was gettin' out the ring, an' we was lookin' to get up an' out pretty quick, when—my heavens alive, Mrs. Lathrop, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various

... totem septs, named after animals or plants. Such are Nag the cobra, Bagh the tiger, Chitwa the leopard, Gidha the vulture, Besra the hawk, Bendra the monkey, Kok or Lodha the wild dog, Bataria the quail, Durgachhia the black ant, and so on. Members of a sept will not injure the animal after which it is named, and if they see the corpse of the animal or hear of its death, they throw away an earthen cooking-pot and bathe and shave themselves as for one of the family. Members of the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... the common, to the common, sir; she has turned off there." I knew this common very well; it was for the most part very uneven ground, covered with heather and dark-green furze bushes, with here and there a scrubby old thorn-tree; there were also open spaces of fine short grass, with ant-hills and mole-turns everywhere; the worst place I ever knew for ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell

... to put in an appearance, so I was left to my own devices. My first attempt to "rush" Pornic up the steep sand-banks showed me that I had fallen into a trap exactly on the same model as that which the ant-lion sets for its prey. At each step the shifting sand poured down from above in tons, and rattled on the drip-boards of the holes like small shot. A couple of ineffectual charges sent us both rolling down to the bottom, half choked with the torrents ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... little, chatty, sibilant, hissing, whistling chuckle, there emerged from a regular cave that he, or an ant-bear, or some other burrower had constructed under an ancient bush, a beast—a most ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... much more effective way of transmigration by the kind assistance of the ant who colonizes the scalebug as well for its wax as it colonizes the Aphis for its honey. Birds on their feathers and the gardener himself on his dress contribute ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various

... him what they all said, down to the ant who crawled in the moss, and the worm who worked ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe

... pork, and beef was sent up from the slaveholding districts of Virginia to Washington's starving army in Pennsylvania. [See Botta's History.] These agricultural products were created by savages, naturally so indolent in their native Africa, as to prefer to live on ant eggs and caterpillars rather than labor for a subsistence; but for years in succession they continued to labor in the midst of their masters' enemies—dropping their hoes when they saw the red coats, running to tell their mistress, and to conduct her and the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... is a marvelous creature. He is a biologic sport, an abnormal variation. New York is the place to watch and study him in his thousands and tens of thousands. You can observe him climbing, climbing, climbing, precisely as an ant climbs a tree. Nothing can really discourage or sway him from his chosen path. If he is not getting on financially, he is getting on socially, or he is using the one method of advance to help him with the other. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... poet, was there. But the center of them all was Olympia Johns herself—spinster, thirty-four, as small and active and excitedly energetic as an ant trying to get around a match. She had much of the ant's brownness and slimness, too. Her pale hair was always falling from under her fillet of worn black velvet (with the dingy under side of the ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis

... gardener's; his abode was the garden. He moved and walked about quite noiselessly; he sneezed and coughed behind his hand, not without apprehension; he was for ever busy and going stealthily to and fro like an ant; and all to get food— simply food to eat. And indeed, if he had not toiled from morning till night for his living, our poor friend would certainly have died of hunger. It's a sad lot not to know in the morning what you will find to eat before night! Sometimes Styopushka ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev

... decision to carry out his purpose. After Pei Ming's departure, Pao-yue continued on pins on needles and on the tiptoe of expectation. Into such a pitch of excitement did he work himself, that he felt like an ant in a burning pan. With suppressed impatience, he waited and waited until sunset. At last then he perceived Pei Ming walk in, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... work on the Phanariotes is that of Marc. Philippe Zallony (Marseilles, Ant. Ricard, April 1824). That author calls himself 'the medical attendant, of several Fanariote hospodars,' and his account of the princes and their rule is sufficiently humiliating without the exaggerations and embellishments of one or two subsequent French writers. Wilkinson, whose work we ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson

... Globo terraqueo fatto dal Casaglieri Ant. Pigafetta. Milan, 1800. 4to.—The same editor published a French translation, with a description of the Globe of Behaim. Magellan's Voyage is published in the first ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson

... did suffer. And truly, this doth be very contrary-seeming, only that you have seen my heart; and all indeed the more human, that it doth be so contrariwise to the brain-reason; and all to be desired, else did a man be no better than an ant or ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... Daisy. Her cedar planks were twisted and had warped in the blazing sun till every seam gaped. A hippopotamus had crunched her bow between his terrible jaws. Many of her timbers had crumbled before the still greater foe of the African boat-builder—the white ant. ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews

... rolling world to creatures here Turns up the deformed wrong side of the year, And shuts him in with storms and cold and wet, He cheerfully does his past labours eat. Oh, does he so? your wise example, the ant Does not at all times rest, and plenty want. But, weighing justly a mortal ant's condition, Divides his life 'twixt labour and fruition. Thee neither heat, nor storms, nor wet, nor cold From thy unnatural diligence can withhold, To the Indies thou wouldst ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley

... pretty ennyvay. Sent me a dotzen of each von of dese in the color dey are dere, ant also in black. I vill just gif you a leetle gomplimentary orter on account of Chack. There is no reeson anyvay vy I shouldn't do beesness mit you. You're de first man on de rote dot efer struck me and didn't ask me to buy goots. I don't ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson

... that orbits the star named Sirius there lived a spirited young man, who I had the honor of meeting on the last voyage he made to our little ant hill. He was called Micromegas[1], a fitting name for anyone so great. He was eight leagues tall, or 24,000 geometric paces of ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire

... infantry fire as they crossed that low wave of ground in the middle of the valley. On the further slope they were ordered to lie down and wait till the flanking movement was developed. Happily the slope, as is usual in South Africa, was thickly spotted over with great ant-hills, beneath which the ant-eater digs his den. Ant-heaps, hardened almost to brick, make excellent cover, and we lay down behind them on any bit of rock we could find, the fire being very hot, and the Mauser bullets making their unpleasant whiffle as they passed. ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson

... used for a big cannon. ("1 King Henry IV", Act ii., Scene 3.) (27) See Book III., 706. (28) According to one story Orion, for his assault on Diana, was killed by the Scorpion, who received his reward by being made into a constellation. (29) A sort of venomous ant. (30) No other author gives any details of this march; and those given by Lucan are unreliable. The temple of Hammon is far from any possible line of route taken from the Lesser Syrtes to Leptis. Dean Merivale states that the inhospitable ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... Micah try to eat this, so that you may git well; and she seemed so pooty, sincere and nateral like in all her ways, that I took to her mightily, specially as I hadn't Miss Adele to look arter and chore reound for, any more. Once or twice, when she came to bring suthin, Ant McNab kinder advised her to do this and that, and the way the leetle critter spunked up and had her own way, made me think o' Miss Adele and pleased me some, I ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage

... ripe? W'y, you thump 'um, en w'en dey go pank dey is green; But when dey go punk, now you mine me, dey's ripe—en dat's des wut I mean. En nex' time you hook water-millions—you heered me, you ign'ant young hunk, Ef you don't want a lickin' all over, be sho dat ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... He realises the hopelessness of writing a history of the Victorian Age; it can only be dealt with in detail; it must be nibbled into here and there; discredited piecemeal; subjected to the ravages of the white ant. He has seen that the lives of the great Victorians lend themselves to this insidious kind of examination, because what was worst in the pretentiousness of their age is to be found enshrined in the Standard Biographies (in two volumes, post octavo) under which most of them ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... trouble is," said she, "that I am not really a butterfly, for all my tinsel wings. I am an ant." ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al

... support from the branches of trees. They are somewhat low, curved over at the top. Amid them were seen small stacks of corn, raised on scaffolds of wood about two feet high, to protect them from the white ant and mouse, as also from the jerboa, which is so pretty an object to look at as it jumps about the fields, but is an especial foe to the natives. The people came forth from the villages to offer cheese and Indian corn. They ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston

... its thriving as sun is to the flowers. If it were not for the spring before it, the flower-root would rot in the ground, the tree canker at the core; the bird would speed south never to return; the insect would not retreat under shelter in the rain; the dormouse would not hibernate, the ant collect its stores, the bee its honey. There could be no life without expectation; and a life without hope in man or woman is that of a machine—not even that of an animal. Hope is the mainspring of every activity; it is the spur to all undertakings; ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

... said Susan, "no, that was n't a success a tall. They spread the tablecloth over a flyin' ant nest in the first place an' Mrs. Macy says shad bones is nothin' to the pickin' out as they had to do while eatin' as a consequence. She says they very soon found out as they was under a wood-tick tree too, an' the children run into a burr-patch after dinner. The minister ...
— Susan Clegg and a Man in the House • Anne Warner

... appearance of evil, and so the scandal which followeth them shall be proved to be active. The divines of Magdeburg(373) infer from 1 Thess. v. 22, speciem mali etiam scandala conficere. Junius teacheth,(374) that scandal is given, sive exemplo malo, sive speciem habente mali. M. Ant. de Dominis maketh(375) the scandal sin, Ubi quis opere suo aliquo, vel de se malo vel indifferenti, aut bono, sed cum specie apparentis mali, proximum inducit ad peccandum, etiamsi intentio ipsius ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie

... storing drawers of honey, when removed from the care and protection of the bees, in order to preserve the honey from insects, which are great lovers of it, particularly the ant. A chest, made perfectly tight, ...
— A Manual or an Easy Method of Managing Bees • John M. Weeks

... amid the faint rattle and rumble of machinery, scores of ships were belching cargoes out upon living swarms of scows, tugs, stern-wheelers, and dories. Here and there Eskimo oomiaks, fat, walrus-hide boats, slid about like huge, many-legged water- bugs. An endless, ant-like stream of tenders, piled high with freight, plied to and from the shore. A mile distant lay the city, stretched like a white ribbon between the gold of the ocean sand and the dun of the moss-covered tundra. It was like no other in ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach

... time it vas opened until now.' He patted and fondled his treasure with a smiling pride and affection. 'They are not to be touched,' he said, 'on any bretext. Nopoty stobs in my house a minute who touches my books. I am Cheorge Dargo, ant ven I zay a thing I mean it' He pointed to a door. 'Through that,' he said, 'is a lafadory. You can vash your hands ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... in a weak Memory and therefore such a method cannot certainly act as a Means for Aiding the Memory. How do I manage this case? By correlating Posterior to Sensory, thus: Posterior ... Post-Mortem ... Insensible ... Sensory; or Anterior to Motor, thus: Anterior ... Ant ... disturbed anthill ... commotion ... Motor; or Anterior ... antediluvian ... rush of water ... water-power ... Motor. In uniting the two unconnected "Extremes" together by means of a developed Analysis memorised, the Natural Memory is aided in ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)

... Dumnonium, who, though stained with every vice, possessed the chief authority among them [a], they sent into Germany a deputation to invite over the Saxons for their protection and assistance. [FN [y] Gildas. Usher, Ant. Brit. p. 248, 347. [z] Gildas. Bede, lib. 1. cap. 17. Constant. in vita Germ. [a] Gildas. Gul. ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... hont an' shot togezzer, mine frond," he said, on making this discovery, "ant I vill show you v'ere de best booterflies are to be fount—Oh! sooch a von as I saw to—— but, excuse me, Van der Kemp. Vy you come ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... body of the book there are also many delights. The description of the ant might rank next to the German language almost in its humor, and the meeting with the unrecognized girl at Lucerne ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... Ant, How hard she works each day. She works as hard as ad-a-mant (That's very hard, they say). She has no time to gall-i-vant; She has no time to play. Let Fido chase his tail all day; Let Kitty play at tag; She has no time to throw away, She has no tail to wag; She scurries round ...
— The Best Nonsense Verses • Various

... the river below the junction last mentioned, remained to be ascertained. Parts of the surface in the scrub, which, before the rain, had been quite bare, now presented a crop of lichen, which bore some resemblance to the orchilla. It might have been gathered in any quantity. The ant-hills in this region, presented a different form from any to be seen in the south, consisting of slender cones of hard clay about the size and shape of sugar-loaves on an average, many being larger, or ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell



Words linked to "Ant" :   Formica rufa, hymenopter, Monomorium pharaonis, hymenopteran, hymenopteron, Monomorium minimum, Formicidae, hymenopterous insect, slave-maker, family Formicidae



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