Phil Robinson

“ With industry, however, the catalogue of the virtues of ants begins and ends. They have an instinct for hard work, and, useless or not, they do it — in the most laborious way they can; but except for the wisdom which industry argues, ants have no title whatever to the epithet of “wise.” Until they learn that to run up one side of a post and down the other is not the quickest way of getting past the post, and that in throwing up mounds on garden-paths they are giving hostages to a ruthless gardener, they can scarcely be accused of even common sense. ”

“ That pipe is its city of refuge, the asylum in all times of trouble, to which it betakes itself when annoyed by the cat who lives in the carrot-bed, or the bird-boy who by his inhuman cries greatly perplexes the robins in the peas, or when its nerves have been shaken by the sudden approach of the silent-footed gardener or by a rencontre with the long-tailed pariah dog that lives in the outer dust. ”

“ To have their own litter lying about makes home intolerable, but that their neighbors should “shoot” theirs also upon them is the very extremity of abomination. Life under such conditions is at once voted impossible, and rather than exist where the next-door people can empty their dust-bins and slop-pails over their walls, they go away headlong. A panic of disgust seizes upon the whole colony, and the bonds of society snap and shrivel up on the instant, like a spider’s web above a candle-flame. ”

“ Straight up the path to the little snag of stone that is sticking out — up one side of it and down the other — over the bank — through a forest of weeds — round a lake of dew, and then, with an extraordinary instinct, for a straight fine, he goes whirling off across the cucumber-bed to some far spot, where he knows is lying a stem of maize heavily laden with grain. ”

“ The ants of Colombia, however, if they fail in that nobility of diligence which seems to be only whetted by disaster, rise infinitely superior to their congeners in the moral virtues of respect for sanitation and punctilious cleanliness. There is, however, even a more admirable psychological fact behind than this, for it appears that the rubbish which scatters them most promptly is not their own but their neighbors’. Their own rubbish, it is true, sends them off quickly enough, but the exodus is, if possible, accelerated by employing that from an adjoining nest. ”

“ They have to provide food for successive broods of hungry youngsters, who, when grown up, will join them in feeding their younger brothers and sisters; or, if they are of the favored few, will enter ant life with wings, and be blown away by the wind a few hundred yards, to become the founders of new colonies. The actual balance of work done by caterpillars and ants respectively is indeed about equal; the only difference being that caterpillars check vegetation by feeding themselves, and ants by feeding their babies; while the balance of mischief done is very much against the ants. ”

“ This excellent ant, it appears, abominates rubbish. If its house is made in a mess it gets disgusted, goes away, and never comes back. Dirt breaks its heart.
The insect in question is a native of Colombia, and hatches its eggs by artificial heat, procuring for this purpose quantities of foliage, which, in the course of natural fermentation, supply the necessary warmth. When the young brood is hatched the community carefully carry away the decomposed rubbish that has served its purpose as a hotbed, and stack it by itself at a distance from the nest. ”

“ Another and more numerous section of the community of ants are the loafers, who spend lives of the most laborious idleness. Instead of joining the long thread of honest worker ants, stretching from the nest to the next garden and busy importing food to the nurseries, they hang about the doors and eke out a day spent in sham industry by retiring at intervals to perform an elaborate toilet. Between whiles the loafer affects a violent energy He makes a rush along the highroad, jostling all the laden returners, stops most of them to ask commonplace questions or to wonder idly at their burdens ”

“ From West to East, therefore, the same trait of unresting diligence has been remarked; and, in one respect, it is no doubt a deplorable retrogression in the Colombia ants that the mere sight of rubbish should thus dishearten them. Yet, looked at from a higher standpoint, their consuming dislike of uncleanly surroundings is magnificent, for they do not hesitate to sacrifice all that is nearest and dearest, to risk even their public character, so long as sufficient effect can be given to their protest and sufficient emphasis laid upon their indignation. ”

“ The commonest of all the Indian ants, or at any rate the most conspicuous, are the black ones, to be found marauding on every sideboard, and whose normal state seems to be one of criminal trespass. These from their size are perhaps also the most interesting, as it requires little exertion to distinguish between the classes of individuals that in the aggregate make up a nest of ants. There is the blustering soldier, or policeman ant, who goes about wagging his great head and snapping his jaws at nothing ”

“ Without a thought of wife or child, of household gods or household goods, they rush tumultuously from the polluted spot. No pious son stays to give the aged Anchises a lift; none loiters to spoil the Egyptians before he goes; none looks back upon the doomed city. ”

“ There has lately been discovered a species of ant which deserves to be at once introduced to the attention of all children, servants, and ladies keeping house. No vestry should be ignorant of the habits of so admirable a creature, and sanitary boards of all kinds should without loss of time be put in possession of the leading facts. ”

“ We human beings cannot all of us afford to show the same superb horror of defective sanitation, but we can admire the ants who do, and can hold them up as models to all slatterns and sluts, parochial or domestic. ”

“ Others are bigots to geographical discovery, and are constantly wandering into dangerous places, whence they escape only by a series of miracles. Of some a pastoral life is all the joy, for they keep herds of green aphides — better known as “blight” — which they milk regularly for the sake of the sweet leaf-juice they secrete. Others, again, are hunters and live on the produce of the chase. They organize foraging parties and issue forth a host of Lilliputians to drag home a Brobdignag cricket; or, marshalled on the war-trail, file out to plunder the larders of their neighbors. ”

“ It sets them in this respect below the bees, who never seem to weary of repairing damages, and far below the white ant of the East, which has an absolutely ferocious passion for mending breaches and circumventing accidents. Nothing beats them except utter annihilation. ”

“ From being laborious managers they have become the sleeping partners in a thriving business. While they were caterpillars they worked hard and well; so Nature, to reward them, dresses them up to look attractive, and sends them out as butterflies — to get married. The ants, on the other hand, did no work when they were grubs, so they have to do a good deal in their maturity. ”

“ To them the degradation of submitting to a neighbor’s cinders and egg-shells seems too despicable to be borne; and rather than live in a parish where the vestry neglects the drains and the dustbins, they abandon their hearths and homes for ever. ”

“ The nest may be dug up with a plough or blown up with gunpowder, soaked with hot water or swamped out with cold, smothered with smoke, or made abominable with chemical compounds, strewn with poison or scattered abroad with pitchforks, — the ants return all the same, and, apparently, with a gayety enhanced by their recent ordeals. ”

“ It does n’t swing like the cat’s, or dart like the scorpion’s. It is never offensively straight on end like a cow’s on a windy day, nor slinking like a pariah dog’s. It has none of the odious mobility of the monkey’s, nor the three-inch arrogance of the goat’s. ”

“ That fluffy perkiness is an index of the squirrel mind. With an upward jerk it puts a question, with a downward one emphasizes an assertion; gives plausibility with a wave, and stings with sarcasm in a series of disconnected lilts; for the squirrel is as inquisitive as Empedocles, as tediously emphatic as the Ephesians, and in self-confidence a Croesus. ”

“ No instance even is on record of a single householder rushing from his premises with all his family rather than endure cobwebs and dust; nor, indeed, of a single child refusing to stay in its nursery because it was untidy. ”

“ In Cornwall the busy murians, as the people call the ants, are still supposed to be a race of “little people,” disestablished from the world of men and women for their idle habits, and condemned to perpetual labor; while in Ceylon the natives say that the ants feed a serpent, who lives under ground, with the leaves which they pick off the trees, and that, as the reptile’s appetite is never satisfied, the ants have to work on for ever. ”

“ Engineering seems to be their favorite profession, although some have a passion for plastering, and when other surfaces fail will lay a coat of mud on the level ground, for the after-pleasure of creeping under it. ”

“ It ought, however, to be kept in mind that butterflies are only beautified caterpillars; and when we see them flying about, we should remember that their work is over and they are enjoying their vacation. ”

“ And so, if the grain holds out, he will go on until sunset, and when the pluffy, roundfaced owls, sitting on the sentinel cypress-trees, are screeching an ilicet to the lingering day-birds, the honest ant is busy closing up his doors ”

“ Given a three-inch post, the squirrel can always keep out of sight. You may go round and round, but it will always be “on the other side.”
Squirrels excepted, the most prominent members of Indian garden life are ants, for they stamp their broad-arrow everywhere ”

“ But where force may fail moral suasion often meets with success, and this has proved true with the ants in question. An observant negro, remarking that the creatures were impervious to the arguments of violence and knowing their cleanly habits, suggested that if the ants could not be hunted or blown or massacred off the premises, they might be disgusted with them. ”

“ He continually loses his own balance, and has to scramble out of worm-holes and dusty crevices; or he comes in collision with a blade of grass which he bravely turns upon and utterly discomfits, and then on a sudden, tail up, he whirls home to report at headquarters the recent violent volcanic disturbances, which, being at his post, he was fortunately able to suppress! ”

“ The damage which they inflict upon gardens and plantations when collecting the leaves required is so enormous that colonists have exhausted their ingenuity in devising means for their expulsion or extermination ”

“ It arises entirely from a generous impatience of neighbors’ untidy habits, from a superb intolerance of dirt. When was such an example ever set, or when will it ever be followed, by human beings? No single city, not even a village, is ever recorded to have been abandoned on account of uncleanliness ”

“ They have a head office in most verandahs, with branch establishments in the bathrooms; while their agents are ubiquitous, laying earth-heaps wherever they travel, — each heap the outward and visible sign of much inward tunnelling, which, towards the end of the rainy season, will fall in. ”

“ It destroys, it is true, something of their traditional reputation for industry that they should thus abandon themselves to despair rather than set to work to clear away the rubbish strewn about their dwelling-places. ”