ANT. 
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to provide for her young. She is averse to solitude, 
always living in society ; is remarkable for a most 
industrious spirit; and is offered as a pattern of par- 
simony to the profuse, and of unremitting diligence 
to the sluggard. 
The sight of ants, says the Abbe La Pluche, is 
really very instructive. They are a little people, 
united, like the bees, in a republic governed by its 
own laws and politics. They have a kind of oblong 
city, divided into various streets, that terminate at 
different magazines. Some of the ants consolidate 
the earth, and prevent its falling in, by a surface 
of glue with which they incrust it. Those which 
we commonly see, amass splinters of wood, which 
they draw over the tops of their streets, and use 
them as rafters to sustain the roof ; and across these 
they lay another rank of splinters, and cover them 
with a heap of dry rushes, grass, and straw, which 
they raise with a double slope, to turn the current 
of the water from their magazines ; some of which 
are appropriated to receive their provisions, and in 
the others they deposit their eggs. 
It is astonishing to see the persevering industry 
with which one of these little creatures will drag 
towards the magazine a mass of provision much 
larger than itself. It is not to be discouraged by 
the weight ; for if, after having tried the utmost of 
its powers to accomplish its purpose, it finds the 
task too great, another will come to its assistance, 
and thus they will together move the load. A 
member of the French Academy found a nest of 
