172 t The Book of Bugs. 



wives, all princesses in their own right, and all quarreling 

 about who should go down to dinner first, I hope you 

 will appreciate the worth of the man that wrote the 

 saying which heads this chapter. He was a nice fellow. 

 He belonged to our lodge. 



I am all the better pleased with King Solomon now 

 that he has been vindicated, for I don't mind telling you 

 that there was one while when he was rather under a 

 cloud, as far as entomologists were concerned. They 

 were free to admit that the wise king might have thought 

 he saw ants carrying cereals into their nests, but they said 

 that an inaccurate observer might easily mistake what the 

 bird-fanciers call " ants' eggs," but which are really ants' 

 cocoons or pupae, for wheat, which they much resemble. 

 But real grains of wheat, oh, never ! Ants' mouth are 

 made to bite, not chew, and they live on juices which they 



/ ! * 



lap up with their tongues as a cat laps milk. More than 

 that, H uber and many other students had watched ants 

 for years, almost every hour of the day and night, record- 

 ing everything they did, and not one had ever seen an ant 

 eat a seed or even bring one into the house except violet 

 seeds, which look enough like cocoons to deceive the 

 very elect. 



It made no difference that the classic writers spoke of 

 ants storing cereal and other grains and that Claudius 

 /Elianus told how they twisted the seeds from herbs and 

 cast them down " to the people below ' -quaint phrase 

 that it made no difference that the Talmud gave decision 

 as to whether the owner or the renter of land was entitled 

 to the contents of the emmets' granaries found on it 

 (I forget which it was, but you may be sure that the 

 ants had no equity in the matter ; the constitution does not 

 apply to them, c,r proprio vigorc, or ex any other vigore). 

 None of these things moved the entomologists, who went 



