Part 21

According to a recent study by Mr. Shapley (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., Philadelphia, vol. vi, p. 204), the normal rate of progression of ants--or at least of the species of ant which he studied--is a function of temperature. For each rise of ten degrees centigrade, the ants go about double as fast. So complete is the dependence that the ants may be employed as a thermometer, measurement of their rate of locomotion giving the temperature to within one degree centigrade.

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The simple consequence--easy of apprehension by us, but infinite puzzlement to ants--is that on a warm day an ant will get through a task four or five times as heavy as she will on a cold one. She does more, thinks more, lives more: more Bergsonian duration is hers.

There was a time, we learn in the myrmecine annals, when ants were simple unsophisticated folk, barely emerged from entomological barbarism. Some stayed at home to look after the young brood and tend the houses, others went afield to forage. It was not long before they discovered that the days differed in length. At one season of the year they found the days insufferably long; they must rest five or six times if they were, by continuing work while light lasted, to satisfy their fabulous instinct for toil. At the opposite season, they needed no rest at all, for they only carried through a fifth of the work. This irregularity vexed them: and what is more, time varied from day to day, and this hindered them in the accurate execution of any plans.

But as the foragers talked with the household servants, and with those of their own number who through illness or accident were forced to stay indoors, they discovered that the home-stayers noticed a much slighter difference in time between the seasons.

It is easy for us to see this as due to the simple fact that the temperature of the nest varies less, summer and winter, than does that of the outer air: but it was a hard nut for them, and there was much head-scratching. It was of course made extremely difficult by the fact that they were not sensitive to gradual changes in temperature as such, the change being as it were taken up in the altered rate of living. But as their processes of thought kept pace in alteration with their movements, they found it simplest and most natural to believe in the fixity and uniformity of their own life and its processes, and to refer all changes to the already obvious mutability of external nature.

The Wise Ants were summoned: they were ordered by the Queen to investigate the matter; and so, after consultation, decided to apply the test of experiment. Several of their numbers, at stated intervals throughout the year, stayed in and went out on alternate days, performing identical tasks on the two occasions. The task was the repeated recitation of the most efficacious of the myrmecine sacred formulæ.

The rough-and-ready calculations of the workers were speedily corroborated. “Great is God, and we are the people of God” could be recited out-of-doors some twenty thousand times a day in summer, less than four thousand times in winter; while the corresponding indoor figures were about fifteen thousand and six thousand.

There was the fact; now for the explanation. After many conclaves, a most ingenious hypothesis was put forward, which found universal credence. Let me give it in an elegant and logical form.

(1) It was well-known--indeed self-evident--that the Ant race was the offspring and special care of the Power who made and ruled the universe.

(1.1) Therefore a great deal of the virtue and essence of that Power inhered in the race of Ants. Ants, indeed, were made in the image of God.

(1.2) It was, alas, common knowledge that this Power, although Omnipotent and Omniscient, was confronted by another power, the power of disorder, of irregularity, who prevented tasks, put temptations in the way of workers, and was in fact the genius of Evil.

(2) Further, it was a received tradition among them that there had been a fall from the grace of a Golden Age, when there were no neuters, but all enjoyed married bliss; and the ant-cows gave milk and honey from their teats.

(2.1) And that this was forfeited by a crime (unmentionable, I regret to say, in modern society) on the part of a certain Queen of Ants in the distant past. The Golden Age was gone; the poor neuters--obligate spinsters--were brought into being; work became the order of the day. Ant-lions with flaming jaws were set round that kingdom of Golden Age, from which all ants were thenceforth expelled.

(2.2.1) This being so, it was natural to conclude that the fall from grace involved a certain loss of divine qualities.

(2.2.2) The general conclusion to be drawn was that in the race of ants there still resided a certain quantity of these virtues that give regularity to things and events; although not sufficient wholly to counter-balance the machinations of the power of evil and disorder.

(2.2.3) That where a number of ants had their home and were congregated together, there the virtue resided in larger bulk and with greater effect, but that abroad, where ants were scattered and away from hearth, home, and altar, the demon of irregularity exerted greater sway.

This doctrine held the field for centuries.

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But at last a philosopher arose. He was not satisfied with the current explanation, although this had been held for so long that it had acquired the odour and force of a religious dogma. He decided to put the matter to the test. He took a pupa (anglice “ant’s egg”) and on a windless day suspended it from a twig outside the nest. There he had it swung back and forth, counting its swings. He then (having previously obtained permission from the Royal Sacerdotal College) suspended the pupa by the same length of thread from the roof of the largest chamber of the nest--a dome devoted to spiritual exercise--and repeated the swinging and the counting. The living pendulum-bob achieved the same daily number of oscillations inside the nest as outside, although it was full summer, and the foragers found the day quite twice as long as did the home-stayers. The trial was repeated with another pupa and other lengths of thread; the result was always the same.

It was then that he laid the foundations of ant science by his bold pronouncement that neither the combat of spiritual powers nor the expansion or contraction of the store of divine grace had anything to do with the strange alteration of diurnal length; but that the cause of it lay in the Ants themselves, who varied with the varying of something for which he invented the word Temperature, not in a contraction or expansion of Time.

This he announced in public, thinking that a tested truth must be well-received, and would of necessity some day prove useful to society. But the consequence was a storm of protest, horror, and execration.

Did this impious creature think to overthrow the holy traditions with impunity? Did he not realize that to impugn one sentence, one word, one letter of the Sacred Books was to subvert the whole? Did he think that a coarse, simple, verifiable experiment was to weigh against the eternal verity of subtle and mysterious Revelation? No! and again a thousand times No!!

He was brought before the Wise Ants, and cross-questioned by them. It was finally decided that he was to abjure his heretical opinion and to recant in public, reciting aloud to the four winds of heaven: “the Ant is the norm of all”--

Μὑρμηξ παντὁς νὁμος.

He said it. But Truth stirred within him, and under his breath he muttered “Eppur si muove....” This was overheard, and he was condemned (loneliness being much hated and dreaded by ants) to a solitary banishment.

Later philosophers, however, by using this same pendulum method, were enabled to find that the movements of sap in plants differed in rate according to the length of day, and later discovered that the expansion of water in hollow stems also followed these changes. By devising machines for registering these movements, they were enabled to prophesy with considerable success the amount of work to be got through on a given day, and so to render great aid to the smooth working of the body politic. Thus, gradually, the old ideas fell into desuetude among the educated classes--which, however, did not prevent the common people from remaining less than half-convinced and from regarding the men of science with suspicion and disapproval.

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