2 VII • 
NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE WEEKLY BOOK REVIEW, DECEMBER 12, 1948 
Ants Are No Job for a Sluggard 
Lively Pursuits of an Ardent Naturalist Through Thirty Years 
Comparative Zoology, he traveled 
through the deserts of the Near 
East. His education — during 
which, characteristically, he se¬ 
cured one degree from Stanford, 
on the Pacific coast, and another 
from Harvard, on the Atlantic— 
was obtained between trips. As 
soon as he finished his doctorate 
examinations at Harvard, where 
he worked under the great ant 
authority, Dr. William Morton 
Wheeler, he was off on a Sheldon 
Fellowship to the Fiji Islands. 
And everywhere he went he en¬ 
countered zoological oddities— 
ants that leaped like kangaroos, 
William M. Mann 
» ANT HILL ODYSSEY. 
By William M. Mann. 338 
pp. ... Boston: Little, 
Brown and Company. $3.50. 
Reviewed by 
EDWIN WAY TEALE 
Author of “Days Without Time 
“The Lost Woods/’ etc. 
T HE distance between Hel¬ 
ena, Mont., William M. 
Mann’s birthplace, and 
Washington, where he has been 
director of the National Zoo for 
nearly a quarter of a century, is 
about 2,000 miles, air line. “Ant 
Hill Odyssey” is Dr. Mann’s story 
of his thirty-year journey between 
Helena and Washington—via the 
Solomon Islands, Haiti, Mexico, 
the Fiji Islands, Australia, the 
Near East and the Amazon Valley. 
Recollections of far-ranging nat¬ 
uralists have produced some of 
the most absorbing of autobio¬ 
graphical books: such books as 
those of Beebe, Barbour, Fairchild, 
in recent years, Wallace and Bates, 
in an earlier time. The author of 
“Ant Hill Odyssey” is an engaging 
raconteur. His memory is stocked 
with good stories and he has the 
gift of serving them without ex¬ 
cess verbiage, like shelled nuts, all 
meat. I enjoyed his book tre¬ 
mendously. 
young Mann attended two dif¬ 
ferent Sunday schools, Baptist 
and Presbyterian. As prizes for 
perfect attendance, he received 
Mayne Reid’s “Afloat in the For¬ 
est” and Richard Henry Dana’s 
“Two Years Before the Mast.” 
These books influenced his life; 
they set him dreaming of visiting 
wild and far-away places. He 
began corresponding with scien¬ 
tists, exchanging specimens with 
them, and out of this corre¬ 
spondence, later on, came oppor¬ 
tunities to travel and collect for 
various individuals and institu¬ 
tions. Equipped with self-assur¬ 
ance, enough luck to supply sev¬ 
eral ordinary lives and a near 
genius for making friends and in¬ 
fluencing scientists to aid him, 
Billy Mann more than realized 
his dreams. 
For one collector he hunted 
beetles in Arizona, for another, 
hummingbird moths in Mexico; 
for others, ants and snakes in 
Haiti. He accompanied a survey 
party sent out by the Santa Fe 
Railroad and brought back an 
assorted collection of snakes and 
insects from Texas. Stanford 
University sent him to the Ama¬ 
zon Basin. With Dr. John C. 
Phillips, of Harvard’s Museum of 
By the time he was four, young 
Billy Mann, son of a harness- 
maker and amateur naturalist 
who died when he was seven, was 
already collecting bugs. He held 
his specimens in place with chew¬ 
ing gum in lieu of entomological 
pins. The summer he was twelve, 
and a cowhand on a dairy ranch, 
he ran away for nearly six months. 
He started his wanderings with 
twenty-five cents, a .22-caliber 
rifle and a Napoleonic flair for 
falsehood. One rancher, who took 
him in on the strength of his 
story that he had been left behind 
by a traveling circus, became so 
attached to him that, many years 
later after Mann had become head 
of the Washington Zoo, he received 
word that the rancher had died 
without heirs and had left his 
estate to him. 
Every Sunday • for two years, 
spiny mice and walking fish, 
stingless bees that made poison 
honey, frogs that appeared 
trimmed with lace, tiny moths 
that lived in caves and developed 
scales of mica and catfish that, 
grew to be eighteen feet long and 
developed scales so hard and 
rough that natives used them for 
nail files. In the Solomon Islands 
Mann talked to former cannibals 
and in the Holy Land he ate 
manna, the sweet, white flakes 
produced by insects among the 
tamarisk trees. Natives of the 
South Seas called him “Doctor of 
the Little Things That Fly.” 
Although he was only in his 
twenties, he was discovering new 
species of insects, rediscovering 
lost types, finding a burrowing 
snake wholly unknown to science, 
having new species named in his 
honor. Probably the rarest find he 
made was an ant in the Solomon 
Islands that represented a whole 
new sub-genus. He picked it from 
a piece of firewood that natives 
collected near a mountain-top 
camp where no white man had 
ever been before. During his 
wanderings Mann’s primary in¬ 
terest was ants. Hence the title 
of his book. 
His story ends when, at the age 
of thirty, he is first entering gov¬ 
ernment service in Washington. 
Written informally, without liter¬ 
ary flourishes, “Ant Hill Odyssey” 
is crammed with odd and interest¬ 
ing bits of information. It is one 
of those comfortable books that 
make the reader feel, almost from 
the start, that he has known the 
author for a long time and that 
they are the best of friends. 
