"Sometimes they proceed, like those I have mentioned in the preface to my first volume, driving all the inhabitants out of a town in a few hours, to a scene of which Mr. Smeathman was an eye-witness; and in other instances, as within the last twenty years, in some of the Caribbee Islands, like a slow but irresistible fire, they gradually, in two or three years, take possession of the land, and carry death and destruction to every kind of animals; so that not only pigeons and fowls, lambs and kids, but even calves and foals, which have been brought forth in the night, have been destroyed before the rising of the sun; and the inhabitants themselves, though they placed the posts of their beds in troughs of water, were driven out of them by these inevitable disturbers. This slow but enormous increase of ants in some of the sugar islands was unknown before the conclusion of the last peace; since which time they seem, in conjunction with some other insects, to have taken possession of many valuable sugar estates, and, by sucking the canes, have rendered {80}them incapable of yielding any of that rich juice from whence this vegetable salt is extracted. "In consequence of this mischievous quality, estates which, by their usual produce, have cleared to the proprietors eight or ten thousand pounds a year, when overrun by these vermin, have not been able to pay the expense of cultivation, except the produce has been changed by planting cotton or indigo, which have been found to suffer much less from their depredations; but, unhappily, most of the planters were ruined before they could submit to give up the cultivation of sugar, which is by much the most profitable.