148 FORMICID^ — ANTS. 



M. de Yeltheim thinks this animal, which, as Pliny says, 

 " has the color of a cat, and is in size as large as an Egyp- 

 tian wolf," is nothing more than, and really is, the Canis 

 corsac, the small fox of India, and that by some mistake it 

 was represented by travelers as an ant. It is not improba- 

 ble, Cuvier says, that some qnadruped, in making holes 

 in the ground, may have occasionally thrown up some 

 grains of the precious metal. Another interpretation of 

 this story has also been suggested. We find some remarks 

 of Mr. Wilson, in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society, 

 on the Mahabharata, a Sanscrit poem, that various tribes 

 on the mountains Meru and Mandara (supposed to lie be- 

 tween Hiudostan and Thibet) used to sell grains of gold, 

 which they called paippilaka, or Ant-gold, which, they said, 

 was thrown up by Ants, in Sanscrit called j^ippHo.ka. In 

 traveling westward, this story (in itself, no doubt, untrue) 

 may very probably have been magnified to its present di- 

 mensions.^ 



The laborious life and foresight of the Ant have been 

 celebrated throughout all antiquity, and from the wise Solo- 

 mon down to the amiable La Fontaine, the sluggard has 

 been referred to this insect to "learn her ways and be wise.'-^ 

 The Arabians held the wisdom of these animals in such es- 

 timation, that they used to place one of them in the hands of 

 a newly-born infant, repeating these words: "May the boy 

 turn out clever and skillful.'" But their wisdom is magnified 

 by all, and in the panegyrics of their providence we always 

 find the following curious notion. Plutarch, in his Land and 

 Water Creatures Compared, thus mentions it: "But that 

 which surpasseth all other prudence, policy, and wit, is their 

 (the Ants') caution and prevention which they use, that their 

 wheat and other corn may not spurt and grow. For this 

 is certain, that dry it cannot continue alwayes, nor sound and 

 uncorrupt, but in time will wax soft, resolve into a milky 

 juice, when it turneth and beginneth to swell and chit; 

 for fear, therefore, that it become not a generative seed, and 

 so by growing, loose the nature and property of food for 

 their nourishment, they gnaw that end thereof or head 

 wher-e it is wont to spurt and bud forth.''''*' 



1 Bostick and Riley's Trans, of Pliny, iii. 39, note. 



2 Prov. vi. 6. Cf. Prov. xxx. 23. 



3 Smith's Bib. Diet. 



* Holland's Trans., p. 787. 



