It is a very pleasant picture to imagine Antaeus standing among the Pygmies, like the spire of the tallest cathedral that ever was built, while they ran about like pismires at his feet; and to think that, in spite of their difference in size, there were affection and sympathy between them and him!

quackeries, zoological obscurities like pismire and botanical terms like

I actually prefer the Old English word for them, emmet or even better the evocative and ever so slightly rude-sounding pismire . Of an estimated 22,000 ant species, 2,500 classified species have been identified from Africa alone and no one really knows how many of these are found in Egypt.

The tribal shaman, Pismire , advises the chief Glurk, and his philosophical comments reveal the history of those they encounter on their way to the major city of Ware, and hopefully, to safety.

He proffers prating pronouncements of pismire presumption--two can play this game--when he writes, "[Coleridge] in his sadness offered a healing and a hope far more capacious and powerful than the paltry poultices and promises of the merely happy."

What inhibits and challenges "the affirmative impulse" in us is "the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life" and "the disproportion between the sky of law and the pismire of performance under it." (54) This mantra criss-crosses virtually all of Emerson's writings.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest, And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.