182 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



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 con- 

 traction 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 conse- 

 quence 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" — 



