The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1880-07-09
The Red Ant and the Picnic Season

IT is an important fact to announce
that the red ant crop is now ripe; that
is, it is ready to pick, or perhaps more
properly to picnic. The picnic has no
nobler use of all its uses than the eleva-
ton of the ant to position, often of
influence. in human affairs. There is
no record of any picnic in any age with
out its red ant. $50 to the ant, thou
sluggard," was only a paraphrase for
ordering some lazy fellow to start on a
picnic and learn to work. When he
finds himself where he has to bring
pals of water. carry the ice, fetch the
baskets, spread the table, and so on,
and finds no chance to rest except by
surrendering to the insect world COM
pletely and becoming alike their high
way and their habitation, then he learns
his little lesson of the advantage of paid
labor and HES away to give up smuggling
and earn honest wages.
The bug is a creature Of already pro-
verbal influence. The man with flea
in his ear and the man with bee in his
bonnet are both monumental, but the
flea and the bee are no more influential
than the ant. Scientists have made a
study of this creature, and the stories
they tell of its intelligence and skill be-
little human generals in war or modern
machinery in peace. and preserve self
respect only as they incidentally illus
trate our ability to comprehend such
genius. But these great students of
nature, with all their information, for
get to give us a few habits of the ant.
They may not indicate genius, but still
they do impress the observer. For one
thing, the ant is ravenously fond of
being eaten. Before, the picnic table
can be spread he will be mixing himself
freely with the fine sugar, he will be
in the cells of the bread, he will be
bathing in the milk and he will be
lost in the melting butter. What
ever we are to eat he will be
part of. He seems bound to
get at the inside facts of human nature.
But he is equally eager for the outside.
One division will go down a mans
neck, and other divisions cOuntermarch
up his arms and ankles. One reason why,
in spite of reason and fat gue, picnic
parties always have dance on the lawn
the moment lunch is over is to shake
out the ants from their clothes. No
body ever really assigns this reason,
but they all feel it and feel the ants,
too, and hence their antics.
Now, man, in his makeup, has no
reciprocal for this love OF the ant for
him. The bug neither improves his
food nor his mood. and SO the one-sided
romance of misplaced affection in. nature
lies before the scientists an unsolved
riddle in whose presence they are
dumb. 1t would be worth more to us,
though, to know how this love for man
developed and how to stop it than is all
that we are told as to the astonishing
plans, tricks, affection,
caution and great courage of ants in
their other relations.
1t is early in the season, truly, to fall |
into this sort of meditation. The picnic
boom has only just begun. and up to
date the ant has had pretty lonesome
time of it. But he is sure of his game
sooner or later. The more ants we eat
at picnic the more we find there the
next time; the more we carry home in
our clothes the greater the supply re-
naming, and as we only have our pic
MICS in ant-time. this will always be so.
It is ant-time nOw.-Charles Dudley
Warner, in Hartford Courant.