YANKEE INGENUITY HAS NOT ENTIRELY DISAPPEARED, A TALE OF "AUSTIN'S ANTS" AND THEIR ANTICS
LEANER and hungrier grow the looks of bears around these parts. Hanover boy-capitalists are interfering with their victuals. Deeper and deeper into the woods the bears retreat but human beings seeking success press on persistently and even there they interfere with the bears' food supply.
Why should this be? Because mankind is curious and, being curious, wants to learn. The fault—if you are on the side of the hungry bears—lies not only with Americans but also with the French, the English, and the Germans. Soviet Russia as yet plays no role.
Or if you want to blame someone person, blame Professor F. E. Austin '95. He offers 14.00 a quart for ants to boys who will bring them in alive. He wants them by the thousands for business and educational purposes, and the bears, who look upon ants as we do on roast beef—a tasty and nourishing and almost necessary food—discover to their chagrin that their frigidaires of hollow trees and rotten logs have been rifled clean.
Even at $4.00 a quart, which is good money for Northern New England where the leaves of trees are somewhat more common than dollar bills, Mr. Austin cannot get enough ants for Americans and foreigners interested in the home life of the ant, in his business and love life, in his cooperative and warring enterprises, in his death and funeral rites.
Is it any wonder? Those with a head for figures have estimated that a minimum of 3,650,000 ants a year leave Hanover. Do not think that Mr. Austin will take any ant; he is selective. Of the 5,000 different kinds of ants he prefers the carpenter ants because they are the largest and most interesting to watch. And of the carpenter ants he wishes the different colonies kept separate, which requires some integrity in the boy-searchers.
Ants, you may not know, are as cantankerous as those white pointed-nose bull terriers that fight and kill just because they do not like another dog's looks. Put a strange ant into an ant colony and the colony immediately rush into combat. The unlucky intruder must fight whether he wants to or not, but fighting will do no good; his enemies will kill him. Put a whole colony in one where it is not native and there will be war on a large scale and the war will continue to the bitter end and the bitter end is death.
You may have seen the look of consternation on a housewife's face when she has discovered ants in the pantry and you therefore wonder what the Hanoverians are doing importing them from the woods where they are sober and God-fearing critters busy and happy in their hollow trees. You will be the exception or a resident of upper Thibet if you have not heard about Professor Austin's ant houses. Each year some 5,000 persons wear down a path to his workshop on South Park Street across from the football field. In December he sent out 2,000 ant houses all over the country. It is a poor month when 400 do not leave town. Twelve men work for him building the ant houses in home work- shops about the countryside, White River Junction, Wilder, West Lebanon, and Lebanon.
One ant house went over on the QueenMary on her maiden voyage and created a mild sensation as it was shown proudly over the ship. The vice president of the National Broadcasting Company was sending it as a present to the president of the British Broadcasting Company. Two ant- houses have gone on other voyages of the Queen Mary and the English seem to like having them and, it is said, like to call the ant houses palaces because queens do not live in houses.
If you do live in upper Thibet, you will want to know first what is an ant house and second how did Mr. Austin think of it in the first place. Even if there is nothing new under the sun, there is always a new vantage point. Ants existed during the time of the Greeks and flourished during the Middle Ages, but it took a modern man and a professor who taught Sunday School in his spare time to see the ant as Aristotle never could.
One day one of Mr. Austin's boys asked him about how ants lived and Mr. Austin advised him to take a spade, open up a hill, and see what he could see. The boy tried it and told Mr. Austin ruefully the next time they met that he could not see much because the dirt kept caving in.
AN ENGINEERING CHALLENGE
This was a challenge which a Professor of Engineering could not refuse to accept (Mr. Austin used to be connected with the Thayer School as Professor in Engineering and Mechanics). Simplicity in construction in everything, and you will admit that if only you had thought of this idea you could have worked it out for yourself.
First Mr. Austin built a wooden frame about 18 inches square and placed two panes of glass for the front and back panels, which left a couple of inches of space between. Into the empty space he threw some coarse sand, a layer of sawdust, and some plain Hanover-New Hampshire-South- Park-Street dirt.
The next move was a reconnoitring expedition with a spade in search of an ant hill. Those were the days when ants had homes within a stone's throw of the College. Within a few minutes Mr. Austin was back with a lot of ants which he deposited in the frame. Sure enough, the ants could not stand about like lazy loafers and within a few minutes they set themselves to work in their new environment. They began to dig into the dirt, to carry the grains of dirt to the surface as the shaft sank below the surface and to work with a nonchalant vim and an unassuming steadiness even though Mr. Austin kept his gaze glued on their now naked activities.
Nor did the ants become discouraged. They worked more and more during the ensuing days until the glass ant house was honeycombed with tunnels.
That is all there is to it, so far as principle is concerned.
But Mr. Austin has allowed his ingenuity to show itself in various embellishments of this principle. He developed the ant house and then branched out into other kinds of structures. Now if you find a mere house boring because you live in one almost every day, you may buy an Ant Coal Mine or an Ant Fire Department or an Ant Polar Expedition or an Ant Palace.
Take the Antville Coal Mine, which is of unusual interest just because so few of us have even been down in a mine, fewer probably than have flown in an airplane. Before your gaze is a mining town with the miners at work excavating "sand" and "rocks" and "gravel" under the ground. A long vertical shaft serves as the tunnel through which the debris comes from the underground tunnels. At the top is the slag pile of excavated material. Day by day the dump pile grows larger and the tun- nels longer and more intricate.
The coal mine has, as all coal mines should have, a whistle that first paralyzes the workers and then sends them scurrying into frenzied activity. You may blow the whistle whenever you please: the ants, who have a profound and consistent sense of duty, will rush to work.
OWNERS PROUD OF THEIR ANTS
It will not be long before you begin to show off your ants as a dog owner does his dog. Just as the dog owner will always pose as one who knows a great deal about dog training even if his dog is completely undisciplined, so will you, now become a scientist, toot on your mine whistle and cry commandingly, "To your picks, you sluggards. To your shovels, you rapscallions." And you will feel the power of a dictator, the most seductive of all forms of egotism, when the workers fall over one another, pell mell, in their anxiety to follow your commands instantly.
If you are a benevolent despot, you will not want to blow your whistle often. Even though you may want to work your ants ten hours a day, except Sundays, instead of the modern eight, the chances are that you will not want to sweat them overtime and on night shifts. You may then adjust a pin which will keep them from laboring more hours than you believe right under "The American Plan."
If you yourself are a miner living the life of a mole, you might prefer to own an ant city where all the activities are on a different plane. Then you will be looking into Mr. Austin's "Ant-Boro" and then you will find a whole social grouping combining both ant and human terms. Why don't you pretend that for the moment you are an ant even if you have an uncle? Feeling like church on Sunday? You will find in this ant colony some ants who go to their Anti-sin Church every day and to their Ant-Mission. Feeling like some amusement? Very well. Using the Long Dist-ant Telephone Company, you will telephone to the Ant-ic Theatre next door to D-ants Hall (not far from the Antiseptic Drug Company) for tickets. Upon arriving in the station you will buy a paper at the newsst-ant and take a taxi at the Amos and Ant-i Taxi Company. After the matinee you may want to do a little shopping at the five-and-ten Ant-Worth and have dinner at the restaUr-ant where you will be sure to find some ant-mosphere.
But before dinner you may as well tend to a lot of errands to work up an appetite and so you go to see your Ant-torney-at- law, your physician Dr. Ant-idote, look up about a new car at the Ant-imobile Market, which has an Ant-iKnock engine, and see about a month's supply of food at the chain store, the Ant-lantic and P-ants-ific, and take out a new policy at the Insur-ants Office.
ANT HOUSES HELP INSANE
This ant-colony all under glass seems like the pinnacle of human ingenuity, but Mr. Austin has not stopped here. On the contrary. He is now working with the Du Ponts perfecting some new glass to be used in the ant houses that go to insane asylums. —(Persons off balance mentally find them- selves benefitted by watching the order, the industry, the neatness, the balance, the spirit of helpful cooperation so manifest in an ant community.) At least one case is on record of one patient restored to normality.
This new glass will be bendable and unbreakable and be called Plastecelle.
And Mr. Austin has also a plan for a glass lens enabling old persons with poor eyesight to watch more easily the activities within. Any person who is afflicted with bodily ailments finds unending pleasure in watching the ants scurrying about on their job and being so quietly efficient. Large numbers of ant houses go to sanatoria and hospitals. Often a sick person who is too weak to read is still strong enough to turn his head and watch the 50 to 150 ants on the other side of glass wall occupy them- selves happily and uncomplainingly about the business of everyday living.
Once a person has bought an ant house (it costs from $3.50 to $8.00 depending on the model and the store) the upkeep is very small. Even if you do nothing, the ants will live on for two months.
Once you learn to like your ants, you may find enough energy to feed them. No herculean strength is needed: a whole colony of 50 ants and one queen will flourish on—mark this well—one (1) drop of honey or of sugar syrup per week. A person unwilling to extend himself to that degree might well be called the world's laziest. And one should not be generous hearted. If the ants get several drops of honey a week, they grow sluggish and die.
There is indeed just one other little duty. Ants do not like too dry-a -climate, and you should be big-hearted enough to humor your little pets and give them their three teaspoonfulls of rain water a week. If you live in Alaska or in Arizona, you may use snow water or distilled water.
That is all that there is to making ants comfortable, and anyone may see after a careful survey of the facts that ants are easier to care for than horses. If you grow fond of your busy workers that demand so little, you may reward them with an apple seed, but if you are indifferent the ants will never raise their voices in complaint but eat sawdust, which Mr. Austin has specially treated, and live on for another four or six weeks.
What about baby ants? There are baby ants, and nurses to go with them. If you want to prove the fidelity of the nurse-ants, tip your house enough to scatter the larvae and the pupae and watch the frenzy of the distracted nurses rushing about and protecting them from the earthquake or the intruder or whatever their hysterical imaginations conjure up as dangers. Don't be a meany and do it more than twice.
The larvae, you will tell your guests in a professional tone, are the baby ants and you will make the point that they are small, grub-like objects. They spin a sort of cocoon over themselves and transform themselves into pupae.
QUEEN'S DEBUT SPECTACULAR
When it comes time for the babies to be grown up, the nurses cut open the cocoon coverings and take out the full grown ants. The most spectacular sight is when the nursemaid ants assist a queen in her emergement. Watch for it.
Business men who are too busy they think to take any interest in ants may be willing to pause a moment to hear about this incident. The New Yorker ran for Russell-Lawder on 445 East 65th Street, New York, a 15 line advertisement about Professor Austin's ant houses. The public became so interested that The New Yorker felt compelled to tell the world about it and did so by giving up an entire page to an advertisement in the March 8th NewYork Times telling the story about people's interest focussing on the fascinating life of the ants and the ingenious creator of the ant house with about a dozen pictures of ants and their palaces.
This story has been mostly about ants, but it could almost as well been about crickets and bees and spiders and flies, for Mr. Austin raises them too. He—to be definite—builds cricket houses also and bee houses also made of glass. You can therefore see the mother cricket, anxious to lay her eggs, going out into the garden and depositing them in the soil using her ovipositor or sharp long probe which projects from the rear of her body to drill the hole. Often the eggs lie against the glass and a watcher can observe the process of hatching.
CRICKETS HAVE AN APARTMENT
It's all very ingenious made still more ingenious by Mr. Austin, who is surely a humanizer. He doesn't have merely a cricket house, but rather he goes farther, builds it in sections and calls it an apartment. As such it has a living room, with a baby grand piano and other tiny furniture, a furnace room, and a garden. Mr. Austin likes to tell you how he puts a drop of honey on the keys to stimulate the young boy cricket to practise his piano lesson. He delights in dropping a pea into the fur- nace which brings the father cricket to his sense of duty to go down and fix the fire.
You can learn a lot of things. You can learn that a mother cricket lays as many as 150 eggs in the cricket house. You can watch a boy and girl cricket marry and become a father and mother, have children, who in turn grow up, fall in love, marry and have children and make the original boy and girl granddaddy and grandmamma. All three generations will be living at home together and liking one another.
You can see the baby crickets changing their clothes of brownish-black into new suits of light yellow, a matter of some 15 minutes, for there is no particular rush to catch a train. Within two hours or so the new suit turns nearly black.
How does a cricket chirp? Try that question on your citified friends. Then tell them this: a cricket chirps not through his mouth but through his wings. The under-neath wing has a series of tiny teeth like saw teeth. On the top of the lower wing is a tiny projectile like a pecten used on a mandolin.
HAS HIS EAR ON HIS ELBOW
When Old Man Cricket or his young son wants to chirp he raises his wings to an angle of about 45 degrees and vibrates them one against the other. The pecten then rubs against the teeth and the chirp is the result. You cannot say that even though Father Cricket likes to hear himself sing, he cocks his ear, for his ear is nothing more than a tiny white spot on his elbow.
You can discover also that only men and boy crickets can chirp. Lady crickets and girl crickets simply haven't it in them.
Even though Mr. Austin has no more crickets, for crickets have been too scarce to supply the demand, does Mr. Austin despair? He does not. In his workshop he has a cricket incubator and starry-eyed mother crickets and swaggeringly proud papa crickets are raising four times the number of offspring they used to. Thus Mr. Austin improves on Mother Nature as we have her in New Hampshire: she requires three months to produce a full-grown cricket with a full-grown chirp; Mr. Austin, only one.
But there is a disconcerning aspect to the ant and the cricket interest. Once you begin asking questions, you cannot stop. You might want to continue your discoveries and probe into the mysteries of the lives of bees and flies and toads.
Mr. Austin has a toad house too. But that is another story.
DISCOVERER OF ANTS At least Prof. F. E. Austin '95 has shownthat ants are very interesting and amusinginsects to have around the house.
THE CYCLE IN THE HOUSE THAT ANTS BUILT Professor Austin filing orders in his unique filing cabinet at upper left. Below, a helpertweezers ants through funnel into houses and another assistant carefully wraps andaddresses the package. Upper right: jars of ants of different sexes and varieties, and belowthe jars are, first an Ant Palace, then a Fire Department, and the elaborate Ant-Boro, inwhich the creatures display the busy and varied existence of a thriving metropolis.
PUTTING ANTS TO WORK AND RESULT OF THEIR EFFORTS Professor Austin blows the coal mine whistle and miners start scurrying about, divingdown the shafts in an effort to please their lord and master. At right may be seen theresult of some months of excavating.
