"Formica" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conditions of proportion in animals. Many persons have thoughtlessly claimed admiration for the strength—supposed gigantic—of insects and smaller animals; because capable of lifting weights, leaping distances, and surmounting obstacles, of proportion apparently overwhelming. Thus the Formica Herculanea will lift in its mouth, and brandish like a baton, sticks thicker than itself and six times its length, all the while scrambling over crags of about the proportionate height of the Cliffs of Dover, ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... great respect for ants; but we do not go the length of some of their historians, or believe them to be, any more than ourselves, infallible. We have seen a laborious ant (magni Formica laboris) tugging a snail-shell (for some reason only known to himself) up a hill, stopping to take breath, and going cheerily to work again till he had nearly accomplished his ascent, and found himself on the very edge of its summit. Here he has been ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various |
