DEBUNKING A TRADITION

Evening Star, Issue 22451, 23 September 1936, Page 3

DEBUNKING A TRADITION

THE FAR-FROM-PERFECT ANT Among the good advice which incessantly hits us human beings like so many lumps of rock is the dictum of .Solomon, who said: “Go to the ant. thou sluggard.” Solomon ought to have had some ■sense, with all those mothcrs-in-Jaw to keep him in order, and as his remark seemed to be addressed to mo personally, I wont, writes Robert Magill, in the ‘ Sunday Pictorial.’ Many famous authors besides myself have at some time or another turned a dishonest penny by writing about the ant; so much so that in addition to the notice on the gate which reads: “ Post 110 hills ” they have added another, “No more ants wanted.” But, unlike them, 1 have come to the conclusion that the ant has really got nothing to be so stuck up about. For an hour or so I watched some ante. True, it was easier than pulling up weeds, which my wife thought I was doing, but it was depressing. These creatures were dashing about after each other from one hole in the garden path to another, all carrying so many useless pieces of rubbish that theyseemed to have been bidding at an auction sale.

Occasionally one ant met another, and they rubbed feelers, like two men shaking hands. Then one obviously told the other that he knew a place where they’d just opened a fresh barrel, and they went off to have one. They do this sort of thing better than we do. Certain ants fill themselves with honey and hang upside down by their feet like slot machines where the thirsty ones can always get a drank for nothing. Unfortunately a mhch larger ant with very big pincers, who was acting as a cross between a foreman and a traffic cop, saw them go. He did not trouble to take their names and adHe bit them. Ho bit one so hard that he bit his head off, but that ant had no more use for a head than a politician has. He shook himself and went into the proper lobby like an M.P. after an interview with the Whip. When I say “he ” I really mean “ she,” because the ant we know is really an undeveloped female who does all the work, like the typist. This is one improvement the ants have made on our social system. The real female, the queen, unlike our own modern women, grows wings and is very flighty before marriage. After that ceremony she leaves the shrivelled-up carcass of her _ deceased husband, bites off her own wings, and settles down to domesticity whereas our own wives no get the wedding ring on than they learn to drive a small car, fill it with golf clubs, and go out to see life. The lady ant then lays eggs at the rate of 60 a minute. I told our hen that, and she asked for her union ticket back on the spot. But the queen doesn’t raise her own family, because the ants have solved the servant problem.

When they need a few new nursemaids they never advertise for a clergyman’s daughter as a lady help. They attack the nest next door, carrying off some selected females as though raiding _ an orphanage, and bring them up in the way they should go—not to snuffle, and never answer back. What is still more wonderful, they clothe and unclothe the baby ants without ever using a safety pin. The policemen ants are really soldiers who form a separate military caste, and the others feed them and tell them when to come in out of the rain. In return, they will fight anything from an influenza germ to a crocodile, and to keep in practice a couple of them will often get down on the mat together, pulling each other to pieces as contentedly as a pair of all-in wrestlers.

The only way they are superior to our own soldiers is that they never spend their pay on the ant nursemaids, because they don’t get any pay. But ants will eat anything. They tell me that the termites, or white ants, with consume a whole shirt, excepting the buttons. My laundry just beats this. It demolishes the buttons as well.

What I object to in the ant as a moral lesson is that he is not only a fool, but a fraud. Ho works hard, but then his wife js about a thousand times as big as he is, so that he has to. You may remember that sanctimonious insect in Aesop who was so rude to the grasshopper with the artistic temperament who danced all the_ summer. He told him to dance all winter. Maybe the grasshopper did have to find a job as a gigolo, but what did the ant do? According to the best authorities he simply went to sleep. Consider an ant who has an appointment which necessitates his going from some place to some other place. Does he consult a map or ask about buses? No. he goes straight to it. If St. Paul’s Cathedral happens to he in the way he crawls over it, and then drowns" himself in the. Thames. I expect that if I did that they wouldn’t miss me very much at the office, but I am thinking about me. not them. He can carry IS times his own weight; and the idiot does. If I felt like that I should keep it to myself, especially when I was out shopping with my wife.