Laudator Temporis Acti

E.O. Wilson (1929-2021), Naturalist (1994; rpt. Washington: Island Press, 2006), p. 151:

In late July, accompanied by Robert Dressler, Quentin Jones, and Methuselah [his pet lizard], I flew from Havana to Mérida, on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. We departed immediately for a week’s collecting in the thorn forest along the Progreso-Campeche Road, with a side trip to the ruins at Uxmal. We found the great temples and courtyards of the Mayan city only partly cleared of vegetation. No tourists or guides were present, and we enjoyed a free run of the grounds. Ants abounded on and among the crumbling edifices, as no doubt they had done 1,400 years previously when the first stones were laid. I climbed the stairs of the Temple of the Magician to a fig tree growing on its apex, and from the branches of the tree collected workers of Cephalotes atratus, a large, shiny black ant with compound spines. Resting briefly by the tree, I reflected on this triumph of the ever-abounding life of insects over the works of man.