The virtual want of it here caused us to make slow and painful progress.
Ants surely are wiser than some men, for they learn by experience.

They have established themselves even on these plains, where water stands so long annually as to allow the lotus, and other aqueous plants, to come to maturity.

When all the ant horizon is submerged a foot deep, they manage to exist by ascending to little houses built of black tenacious loam on stalks of grass, and placed higher than the line of inundation.
This must have been the result of experience; for, if they had waited till the water actually invaded their terrestrial habitations, they would not have been able to procure materials for their aerial quarters, unless they dived down to the bottom for every mouthful of clay.

Some of these upper chambers are about the size of a bean, and others as large as a man's thumb.

They must have built in anticipation, and if so, let us humbly hope that the sufferers by the late inundations in France may be possessed of as much common sense as the little black ants of the Dilolo plains..