MONTHLY 
O 
Vol. X. COLOMBO, NOVEMBER ist, 1890. (No 5. 
“ THE MAN AND THE ANT.” 
HE above title is not in- 
tended as a plagiarism on 
our old friend yEsop. 1 
is meant only to indicate the 
warfare which has raged from 
time immemorial between 
the most intelligent of 
mammals and almost the smallest — albeit the most 
highly gifted as to mental power— of the insect 
tribe. In that warfare man, with all his great 
gifts of intellect and his vastly superior strength, 
has been heavily worsted by his relatively in- 
significant opponent. There are few of us, we 
imagine, who can fail to share Sir John Lubbock’s 
appreciation of the extraordinary capacity of our 
tiresome little enemies, for as such we are certainly 
justified in classing the ant tribe. It is unfortunately 
the case that in all tropical countries— and in 
none more so, we should say, than in Oeylon — 
the opportunities for observing and for appreciating, 
—after a left-handed fashion,— the qualities of the 
ant are particularly and regrettably wide. They 
invade our meat safes, they disturb us in our beds 
and even extort cries of pain from us when met with 
in their jungle habitats, and they cap all their aggres- 
sions upon their human foes by eating our houses 
over our very heads. Truthfully may it be said that 
hitherto no adequate, inexpensive remedyas b een 
devised by which the balance of advantages now so 
largely in favour of the ant may be redressed 
jn our favour. In spite of all attempts, of the 
many suggestions which have been put forward, 
the little insignificant-looking insect continues 
master of the situation, and daily, in one form 
or other, makes us feel his power. Has not 
the so-called ant of the white epidermis almost suc- 
ceeded in eating a whole Colony — that of St. 
Helena — practically out of house and home, an*i 
rendered it at one time a matter of serious con- 
pideration whether it would be practicable for 
Great Britain to remain the tenant of that isolated 
island 1 We know that the ravages of the white-ant 
not many years ago, did render such an evacuation 
within the “ range of practical politics,” and all 
methods of treatment tried in other Colonies 
have failed to keep under this ravaging little 
intruder on domestic comfort. 
We are, therefore, inclined not altogether to 
pooh-pooh a suggestion offered to us as to a possible 
method of largely exterminating these little pests 
which has at least, so far as we know, the re- 
commendation of novelty. It is known that a 
low range of temperature is as fatal to insect 
life as a higher range is to its production 
and maintenance. The numbers in which ants 
swarm, and the extent of their wonderful sub- 
terranean galleries, render it most difficult to 
reduce their numbers. To get at the “ Queen Ant ” 
without the destruction of which all efforts at 
exterminating are fruitless, is a work often of great 
labour, and very frequently is wholly unsuccessful. 
Chemical solutions, to be used in the large quantities 
necessary, are costly and sometimes difficult of appli- 
cation. Well, it is now suggested to us that we 
might freeze our foes out of existence in the 
neighbourhood of our dwellings 1 We have heard 
how quicksands are now passed through, 
in excavations, by the use of freezing mixtures 
which suffice to turn the moisture of large cubes 
of soil into solid blocks of ice. The idea now is 
that a cask of such freezing mixture should be 
fixed over the main entrance to an ants’ nest — the 
others being closed up with clay, as they become 
apparent — and that a tube from it should be placed 
into the hole and also well “ luted” with clay. I'he 
pressure due to the head of liquid in the cask would 
suffice to drive the freezing mixture into the inmost 
recesses of the galleries, and these, it is expected, 
would almost instantly become lined with solid 
ice, or at all events would have such intense 
cold produced in them that no ant, however tena- 
cious of life, could long survive exposure to it. 
Such freezing mixtures are, we are told, exceedingly 
cheap— they could not otherwise be used on the large 
scale they now are in engineering operations — and 
it may be found that the progress of science in 
the latter part of the nineteenth century has 
achieved a victory for which so many past gene- 
rations have contended though in vain, 
