NEW YORK 
HERALD TRIBUNE, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 1948 
Books and Things 
===== By LEWIS GANNETT ===== 
ANT HILL ODYSSEY. By William M. Mann. Little, 
...Brown. 338 pages. $3.50, 
P “SUCCESS is doing what you like to do and 
making a living out of it,” then William M.JMann, 
director of the* National Zoo in Washington, must 
be one of the world’s greatest successes. He began, 
&b a small boy, making pets of toads and snakes 
| and dreaming of the circus, and, in one way or 
another, he has been playing with animals ever 
since. His specialty is ants. 
A Small Boy in Helena , MonL 
The Helena, Mont., public library’s copy of that 
great book, Dan Beard’s “American Boy’s Handy 
Book,” was his Bible as a boy trapper, and the copy 
of Mayne Reid’s “Afloat in the Forest” which came 
to him as a prize lor perfect attendance, at the 
Baptist Sunday School inflamed his imagination. 
Before he was twelve Bill Mann had a summer 
job as a cowherd, and spent his days collecting 
small animals. 
One evening as he was driving the cows home he 
spied a little bushy-tailed black-and-white animal, 
: and was so excited watching his first skunk that he 
brought the cows home an hour late. The boss was 
angry; twelve-year-old Billy Mann picked up his gun 
and his only 25 cents and started off toward the 
Pacific Ocean. It was five and a half months before 
his mother saw Billy again. It hadn’t occurred ot him 
that his mother might worry; still less that an 
alcoholic madman in the local jail might have 
added to her worries by confessing that he’d killed 
a boy in the mountains and left him for the coyotes 
to eat. Billy hkd been ranching, and having fun. 
Trouble in the Bug Business 
Mother thought that school might do Billy some 
good. Billy kept his pet sucker fish and crawfish 
in his room all his first winter at Professor Lyon’s 
boarding school in Spokane, but his night-croaking 
tree frogs were outlawed to the back porch. It was 
in Spokane that Billy began collecting insects and 
snakes with a cyanide bottle. His cyanide bottle 
got him into trouble in Chicago—Chicago’s vacant 
lots were and still are, he says, the most productive 
snake-hunting fields he has ever found. But urban 
snake-hunting looked suspicious to a Chicago po¬ 
liceman, who took Billy and his companions to the 
station house, frisked them, and wanted to know 
what the boys were doing with deadly poison. 
"Are you in the drug business?” the cop 
asked. 
“No, the bug business,” Billy replied, and the 
officer didn’t think it funny. Billy Mann still does. 
At Staunton Military Academy, in Virginia, Billy 
continued collecting snakes, and demonstrated to 
himself, by experiment, that the bite of the cop¬ 
perhead is not fatal. After he discovered that 
Latin and other foreign languages were helpful in 
identifying snakes and beetles, he turned into a 
good student. 
Boy With a Destiny 
He got a summer job in the Texas Panhandle, 
planning to save his money and raise gnus for 
circuses. Instead he bought books, mostly abbut 
snakes, and collected snakes, live and pickled. He 
became a correspondent of most of the museums 
in the country, and soon shifted his center of at¬ 
tention to insects. It was a proud day when he 
discoveied that he had collected a wasp new to 
science, and that Harvard’s greatest entomologist 
had named the species after him, Oxybellus manni. 
Billy Mann was not yet twenty. 
In the next ten years Billy Mann finished college,' 
at the University of Washin%ton and at Leland 
Stanford and went on to a doctorate (in ants) at 
Harvard, meanwhile straying off to' southern Ari¬ 
zona to collect rare ‘purple beetles, to Brazil (a 
country which tie describes as "one great ant nest”), 
to Haiti for more ants, to Mexico for hummingbird 
moths, to Egypt for spiny mice, to the Fiji Islands 
for click beetle fireflies and all over the Solomons, 
then still head-hunters’ country, for tree ants and 
lace-trimmed frogs. And so, at thirty, to the first 
job which had ever paid him more than $600 a year. 
This is the story Dr. William M. Mann tells in 
his "Ant Hill Odyssey,” with communicative gusto 
and a ricfi sense that no young man, driving toward 
his destiny, ever had a better time in life. Some¬ 
times, telling of his further wanderings, he slips into 
writing just another travel book; but when he is 
telling of himself, an eager boy with an exact pas¬ 
sion for animals, his pen flies, and the reader shares 
the boy’s excitements. 
