THE WASHINGTON DAILY NEWS, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11, M«~jt 
Co to the Ant, 
Thou Sluggard, 
With a Lamb Bone 
By TOM DONNELLY 
AS one day every man must, Dr. William M. Mann, director Ox 
the National Zoo, has written a book. It is called Ant Hill 
Odyssey” (published by Little, Brown and Company) and, as you 
m ight expect from the title, it is all about ants. 
.There is virtually nothing in it 
about the Zoo, for Dr. Mann has 
thriftily saved his one million anec¬ 
dotes about lions and monkeys in 
captivity and the amusing habits 
of the aardvark for a later volume. 
At his office yesterday Dr. Mann 
was more or less constantly occu¬ 
pied with the telephone. “No, 
madam, it couldn’t be a copperhead. 
It sounds like a black snake, quite 
harmless. He’ll probably be a big 
help to you, eating up the' mice 
around the place.” 
Dr. Mann is cheerfully patient 
‘GO TO THE ANT, THOU 
SLUGGARD; CONSIDER HER 
WAYS AND BE WISE . . 
—Solomon, Proverbs VL 6 
“In the evening would come 
columns of army ants, sometimes 
into the houses, to be fled from 
by the human inhabitants till they 
had completed exploring the quart¬ 
ers and marched away, carrying 
cockroaches and other insects, 
They would do a thoro job of 
nr. iviarui is uicciiuaj *,«*..«.**. housecleaning, tho we did not ap- 
with the anxious pet lovers who p re ciate it when we had to sit 
call up for information on how to ou t s ide in the rain for half the 
doctor a sick cat or how to keep a 
parrot from pulling out its feath¬ 
ers, but he was furiously annoyed 
with the jokester Who demanded, 
at regular intervals, to speak to 
Mr. Camel E. Hump. 
* 
night.” 
By the way, Dr. Mann has what 
he insists is an almost surefire 
recipe for getting rid of "Washing¬ 
ton ants. Just put a lamb bone on 
your drain board, ladies, wait till 
several hundred ants have swooped 
W HEN interviewing people en- down upon it with wriggles of 
gaged in unusual occupations, ecstasy, and then pour boiling 
like girl steeplejacks or male mid- water over the whole. This will 
wives, it is customary to ask them no t only destroy 90 per cent of the 
what drove them to their particular pests, but the survivors will pass 
lines of work. This is a question along the word that this house is 
I have never heard satisfactorily a good house to get out of. 
answered. In Dr. Mann’s case it was Dr. Mann who introduced 
there was no need to ask it, how- the Combophora beski to . the 
ever, for his book reveals that he civilized scientific world. This is 
has been passionately devoted to an insect which has “a large, thin, 
all forms of animal life, including shell-like structure, armed with 
rattlesnakes, almost since birth. spines, mottled in color, and actu- 
Dr. Mann’s was probably the ally larger than the rest of the in¬ 
most spectacularly all-American sect. It may resemble in mini- 
boyhood on record. He was born ature a Roman helmet,_ an anchor, 
in Helena, Mont., in 1886, went on or a pawn-broker s sign. _ It is 
hunting trips with his father at the perhaps the most elusive of insects 
ase of 7, and a few years later ran for, when captured, it. simply 
away from home and got a job on leaves its shell behind and hops 
a ranch. Communication was a off to safety. , . 
hazardous thing in those days, and Plenty f 
five months had passed before his believe m the Combophora besk. 
mother discovered where he was. Ask a silly question and g% 
Altho she might well have been a silly answer, the sa to es tell us. 
.nfwt LS hv thic: Psranade oar- Dr. Mann, seeking a suitable ex- 
&ularly since In in!ane P alcoholic planation for the institution_taown 
tad told the world that he had as 
wantonly murdered the runaway land . > j aco t: c reply "To 
some*'meaTtvith 1 our vege- 
later on let him take a job with a tables, 
circus. 
The early part of “Ant Hill 
Odyssey” is filled with such tan¬ 
talizing bits as; “Next door to us - 
in Helena lived Emma Huffer, the 
first socialist I ever knew. She ex¬ 
plained to me that eventually all 
races would be quite the same, and 
that this would be brought about 
by the Japanese.” 
• Dr. Mann cannot now remember 
just what Emma’s notion was, 
apart from the fact that she im¬ 
agined the Japanese would spread 
to the four corners of the globe, 
marrying like mad as they spread. 
^ 
T HE innumerable Washington 
housewives who are even now 
doing battle with the hordes of 
baby ants which infest kitchens 
in this part of the world, should be 
held spellbound by such passages 
as this, from the section of Dr. 
Mann’s book dealing with his ex¬ 
periences as an ant hunter in Bra¬ 
zil: 
