AGRICULTURAL ANTS 



the eighteenth century, when Gould, an English clergy- 

 man, who had made some admirable studies of British 

 ants, raised a note of doubt. He found no harvesting 

 ants in England; therefore he challenged the accuracy 

 of antiquity, Solomon included. 



Doubt has a bacterial quality of dissemination and 

 multiplication, and erelong the ancient belief in har- 

 vesting ants was reversed. Latreille, at the head of 

 French entomologists, declined to "be so weak as to 

 perpetuate the popular error." The Swiss Huber, the 

 incomparable historiographer of ants, as charming in 

 style as accurate and original in observation, "relin- 

 quished the opinion." The English Kirby, a high au- 

 thority in entomology (and, like Gould, an Anglican 

 clergyman), cautiously concurred in the prevailing doubt, 

 and opined that an extraneous interpretation had been 

 fathered upon Solomon's words. 



Even that noble work of sacred scholarship, Smith's 

 Bible Dictionary, in the American edition of 1868, 

 apologized for Solomon as "adapting" his language 

 (Proverbs vi. 6-8; xxx. 25) to the common belief that 

 the kernels carried by ants into their nests were used for 

 food instead of for building material. 



Here and there was heard a note of dissent, harking 

 back to the early faith. Thompson, the American mis- 

 sionary, in his now classical work, The Land and the 

 Book, and Moggridge, of England, in his delightful stud- 

 ies of the harvesting ant of southern Italy, gave testi- 

 mony that ought to have prevailed, but failed to reverse 

 the popular opinion. It is quite true, although not the 

 current belief, that science is conservative towards well- 

 rooted notions, and often inhospitable to the new and 

 radical. Thus it came about quite naturally that the 



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