The bones of extinct animals of monstrous size, so frequently met with, gave rise, as well they might, to the story of the giants. The _pigmies_ are a race unfortunately not yet extinct, and are palpably the _ants_, whose marvellous works (especially in the part of the country I am speaking of), vying with those of man himself, are no less calculated to have occasioned at first sight, amongst credulous people, the most far-fetched conjectures as to their origin. I have made some allusion, in speaking of the course of the river Paraguay, to their ingenious contrivances in the lakes of Xarayes (where also the pigmy tribes were said to have dwelt), but those are nothing compared to the works of the ants of Corrientes and Paraguay, where whole plains are said to be covered with their buildings of dome-like and conical forms, rising five and six feet and more in height, and formed of a cement hard as a rock, and impervious to the wet. Man's vanity might easily prompt him to mistake them for works of his own kind in miniature; but, all-presumptuous as he is, nothing he has ever yet constructed in all the plenitude of his power is comparable to the works of these little insects. The Pyramids of Egypt do not bear one half the relative proportion to his own size which the ordinary habitations of these ants do to theirs. Their works under ground are no less extraordinary: Azara has described with his usual minuteness the various species which he fell in with. There is one amongst others which is winged, and the swarms of which are so prodigious, that he says he rode for three leagues continuously through one of them. This was in about the latitude of Santa Fé, where they particularly abound, and where the people catch them and eat them. The hind parts it seems are very fat, and they fry them into a sort of paste or omelette, or, mixed up with sugar, make sweetmeats of them.