Sex In Ants

1895

The different species of ants are pretty generally distributed over the globe, and on this account the naturalists infer that there is work for them to do in the great economy of the universe. In each colony males, females, neuters and sometimes soldiers are to be recognized. The males are invariably smaller than the females, and, like those of the feminine gender, have wings in their original state. The neuters, which are the workers, are without wings in any of their transformations, and the soldiers are recognized by the armor plates on their heads. — St. Louis Republic.


Moslems

The Moslems have two festivals of special importance, the Greater Bairam and the Lesser Bairam. The former is in memory of Abraham offering his son Isaac and lasts four days.


Pins

The first pins brought to England were made in Spain. They weighed about a quarter of a pound and cost a little over $1.

A Live Beetle In Iron Ore

1895

Z. T. White, who is now or has very recently been a citizen of El Paso, Tex., was once the owner of the most wonderful entomological specimen ever found since the creation of the world — a live beetle found in a solid matrix of iron ore. The curiosity was discovered a considerable depth below the surface in the Longfellow mine, at Clifton, A. T., and fitted his iron sarcophagus as snugly as though the iron had been in a plastic state when it came in contact with the creature's body. The "bug" was of a dull, reddish gray color and was of course of a species wholly unknown to the entomologists. According to the El Paso Bullion, this wonder was presented to a well known scientific association of the Atlantic slope about two years ago. — St. Louis Republic.


The Cheerful Idiot

"One swallow doesn't make a spring," said the boarder who misquotes.
"A swallow of beer might," said the Cheerful Idiot.
And when the landlady guessed that it might make a spring on account of the hops in it the Cheerful Idiot got huffy and left the table before the prune pie was served. — Indianapolis Journal.

Friendly Bugs

1895

The New York Entomological society has been having a sale of bugs, and in the list of sales we find that a long horned tickler, alias the Monohammus titillator, was knocked down for 30 cents. It is related as a peculiarity of these bugs that when two of them meet each other on the road they stop and wave their horns at each other. This is equivalent to a handshake without the drink that usually goes with it. — Boston Herald.


Character

Into one's character, as into the characters of others, one gets little flashes of real light here and there, now and then. The moments are not agreeable. They are the flashes of a policeman's lantern. While they are shining disguise is impossible.


Millet

The Italian millet now used almost entirely as a food for birds was formerly sustenance for men.

Insect Vision

1895

The Probabilities as to What They Can See With Their Strange Eyes.

Two theories of insect vision are extant — the older one that each lens forms a separate eye, and the more recent one that insects see as in a mosaic, each lens forming part of the total picture. The old view is supported by the experiment of placing a thin slice of an eye under the microscope, when the image of any object reflected from the mirror is seen to be transmitted through each of the hexagonal lenses. A rough model of an insect's eye may be made by taking a glass shade of the form of a half sphere, say about 16 inches in diameter. Place the eye at the center of the globe and paint on its surface the picture of the outer world as seen through it. If this painting be divided into squares by lines scratched at intervals of one-eighth inch, there will be 25,600 of them, and the proportions are roughly those found in the eye of a dragon fly.

If now, instead of the details of the picture on each square, a dab of color be placed on it corresponding to the general tone, the effect of the whole will pretty nearly agree with that of the original painting. It is probably this indistinct vision that insects actually possess. Mathematically it may be shown that to obtain anything like such perfect vision as human beings enjoy an eye constructed on the compound type would have to be of most impracticable size. In our eyes the rays of light passing through a single lens form an image on the concave retina. The retina is built up of the sensitive terminations of the optic nerve, forming, a kind of tessellated pavement with 36,000,000 squares to the square inch. If our lens were of perfect shape and the pupil wide enough, the size of things which might be seen as distinct objects would be limited by the distance of the nerve endings of the retina from one another. In order that two points may appear separate to the eye, they must subtend an angle of about one minute of arc — that is, for instance, that fine lines ruled one-twentieth of an inch apart can be made out to be separate at a distance of four yards. Beyond this the whole surface has a uniform gray tint.

Calculations clearly show that insects cannot see nearly as well as this, and their behavior to distant objects favors this opinion. But their eyes have this advantage — namely, that there is practically no limit to the nearness of objects they can examine. The details of their own antennae probably appear plainer to themselves than to us, but objects at the distance of a foot appear to them with about the same minuteness of detail as would be attained if they were made of rather coarse wool work. Beyond this the shades of light and dark are evident to them, but outlines must be blurred and lost. — North British Advertiser.

Insects Carry Disease

1917

Our knowledge of the connection of insects with diseases is a very modern acquisition. In his presidential address to the Washington Academy of Sciences, Dr. L. O. Howard noted that standard medical works of a score of years ago made no mention of the subject, but recent literature records 226 different disease germs as known to have been carried by insects to man or animals, 87 organisms as known to be parasitic in insects but not known to be transmitted, and 282 species of insects as discovered causes or carriers of diseases of man or animals.

The transportation by wind of the body-louse, the carrier of typhus fever, is among late discoveries to which many writers have given attention. Tick paralysis is another novel subject, the disease occurring in Australia, Africa and North America, and 13 cases have been reported by a single Oregon physician.

Progressive paralysis of motor but not sensory nerves follows the attachment of the tick. The disease is not infectious, and it has not been decided whether it is due to a specific organism or to nerve shock. Infantile paralysis is believed to be one of the diseases not carried by insects.

Will Women Abandon Love?

1910

Gertrude Atherton, the novelist, has been writing for Harper's Bazar on "The Woman in Love." In her first two papers Mrs. Atherton discusses those women in history whose love episodes have been the most striking thing about them. In her third paper, however, not yet published, she makes some predictions concerning the place that love will take in the future.

Mrs. Atherton does not go so far as Mrs. Belmont, who predicts that there will be a war between the sexes, due to the fact that men will not give women the suffrage. Mrs. Atherton believes and states, however, that from now on the love element will be a far less vital thing in women's lives than it has been heretofore. She thinks that the broadening out of feminine interests, the entrance of women into new fields, the intellectual development of women, are all factors which will fill women's lives to the comparative exclusion of that other factor which heretofore has been supposed to be "her whole existence."


The Busy Ant

Ants have six ears, which are located at about the queerest places imaginable — the legs. The ants are deaf to all sounds made by the vibration of the air, but detect the slightest possible vibrations of solid matter. This is supposed to be to their advantage. So sensitive are their feet that they can detect the drop of a small birdshot dropped on a table from a height of six inches and about 14 feet distant from an artificial nest placed at the other end of the table. The ant also has an elaborate array of noses.

Hungry Enough To Eat A Rhinoceros

1896

Palatable Around The World

The rhinoceros, the elephant and the hippopotamus, three most gigantic of creatures, are all edible, and, indeed, greatly esteemed as food, the Boston Traveller says.

The porcupine has a repulsive exterior, but a delicious interior, when properly served.

How strange it seems to eat moss! Yet the Iceland moss, found in the west and north of that country, is excellent for consumptives, and is used in Iceland in times of scarcity.

The Old World species of locusts form articles of food with certain semi-civilized and savage races, by whom they are considered as delicacies, or as part of ordinary diet.

There is a kind of clay eaten by certain people in the Carolinas.

Grasshoppers are eaten by Indians.

To most people in our country snails seem to be a strange food, though they have been used for a long time in France, Italy and Spain. The helix pomatia, or the edible snail, which is the kind that is used, has in recent years been farmed in this country, and sold in the New York markets.

The selection of the tongues of birds as an article of diet seems to us strange, yet the tongues of song birds and of the peacock were great delicacies among the Romans.

Harvesting the Sun

1896

When we sit in front of a coal fire and enjoy its generous warmth, do we realize that the heat and light of the burning coal are really sunshine that has been stored up for ages? Such is the fact. Centuries ago the sun shone on the earth, the plants and trees grew, fell, and grew again; they were covered by geologic deposits, and acted upon by great heat and pressure, until in the course of years and ages these broad layers of organic matter were transformed into coal. The coal thus represents the work done by the sunshine years ago, and when it is burned the imprisoned solar energy is loosened again.

Our system of power production depends upon this presence of energy. But coal is a wasteful source of energy. Even the best engines do not utilize over 10 per cent of the calculated energy of the heat of coal. And, besides this it is an inconvenient thing in many ways; it has to be mined, freighted and stored. Can we not find some more economical way of using the sun's energy?

During the last few years the great progress in electrical science has enabled man to utilize the solar heat in a thriftier way. During its day's work the sun draws up a large amount of water from the oceans and damp earth. By the action of its rays plant life flourishes, and plants draw from the ground and evaporate into the air large amounts of water. Thus an oak tree of average size, with seven hundred thousand leaves, lifts from the earth into the air about one hundred and twenty-three tons of water during the five months it displays its foliage. This evaporated water, sooner or later, falls as rain, and by the action of gravity begins to flow downward. Thus the great rivers are fed. Round and round incessantly goes the water lifted by the tireless sun to fall when deserted by him, and again to fall and run seaward as long as it may exist upon this earth.


Peculiar to the Locality

Some interesting discoveries have recently been made about animal life on the Hawaiian Islands. It appears that all the land and fresh water shells are peculiar to the locality. Nor is that all. Fifty-seven out of the seventy-eight species of birds, and seven hundred out of the one thousand species of insects do not exist in any other portion of the globe.

Scientist Say Ants Have Form of Salutation Among Themselves

1915

New Discovery About the Insects

Ants have long been known for their excessive industry, but from a curious communication which has just appeared they seem to have surpassed all other insects by organizing an elaborate system of signaling.

Professor Bugnion, who has recently investigated the habits of the white ant, reports that the "soldiers" of that species give warnings or encouraging signals by knocking with their jaws upon dry leaves, thereby emitting a crackling sound. Placing some of these ants on a big plate and covering it with paper, he found that the "soldiers" among the ants responded to his taps with a rustling, crackling sound.

Moreover, apart from this audible signaling, there appears to be some inaudible form of signal, for the professor asserts that the "soldier" ants salute the worker ants.

To do this, "the insect stands firmly on its legs with the head raised and the body slightly oblique, and shakes itself for an instant with a convulsive shudder. This seems to mean something."


Sunny World

If you want it to be a sunny world stop wearing a cloud on your brow. — Florida Times-Union.

All Fear The Mantis

1914

Remarkable Attitude of Prayer While In Wait for Prey

Most persons know the praying mantis — that large, greenish, grasshopper-like insect which holds up adoring arms as if venerating some deity of the woods, or making an invocation — an oracle among insects, as the old Greeks thought it. But these attitudes of prayer conceal the most atrocious habits; these supplicating arms, to fall into Fabre's picturesque phrasing, are lethal weapons; these fingers tell no rosaries, but exist to seize the passer-by.

Although a member of a vegetarian family, the mantis feeds exclusively upon its living prey. It is a tiger in ambush; and if only it had sufficient strength its ogrish appetite and its horrible facility of concealment by color and form among the green leaves where peaceful insects travel would make it the terror of the countryside.

At first glance it does not look very terrible. Its neck is flexible and it can turn its head and look with sharp eyes all directions, but no formidable jaws affright a victim. In its powerful uplifted forelimbs lies the hidden, danger, the cruel trap. Each long thigh, shaped like a flattened spindle, carries on the forward half of its lower face a double row of steely spines, alternately long and short; and three needlelike spikes, longest of all, rise behind the parallel rows, between which the fore leg lies when folded in "prayer." This fore part of the leg is similarly armed, but with smaller spikes, and terminates in a hook with a blade like a pruning knife and a tip as sharp as a needle. Handle the insect incautiously, and this armament discovers itself to you instantly, thrusting its needles and blades into your flesh gripping you in a stinging vise and forcing you to crush it to get free.

When the mantis is in repose these weapons are folded and pressed against the chest, showing nothing of their ferocity. The bandit's sword is sheathed and it seems at its devotions. But let a victim come within reach and the ruse — if ruse it be — is abandoned like a flash. The three long joints of the deadly forelimbs straighten and shoot out their talons, which strike the victim like the unsheathed claws of a cat and drag it back between the saws of the thighs. The vise closes with an upward motion, as a man would bring his hand up to his shoulder, and no cricket, grasshopper, beetle or spider can struggle out of the crook of that terrible elbow. — Harper's Weekly.

Nature's Secrets — Possibilities of Solar Power

1920

Man gets to feeling pretty smart at times, but nature still has a great deal to teach him if she only would, says the Ohio State Journal. A scientist in the employ of the National Electric Lamp Association at its great plant in Cleveland devoted the entire season last year to studying the lightning bug in the effort to find out how that interesting creature makes light without heat. He failed to discover the secret, as had many another scientist before him.

The potential power which falls on the decks of a battleship in the sunshine of an August day, if it could be harnessed and utilized, would drive the ship vastly faster and farther in a day's journey than its great engines can drive it. The problem of harnessing presents, thus far, the insurmountable difficulty. When that is solved, as probably it will be someday, people will heat their houses with stored sunshine and gas shortages and coal strikes will be matters of perfect indifference.

Nature is jealous of her secrets, but she has grudgingly given up some and she will give up more as time goes on for she cannot resist forever the blandishments of the endless race of wooers whose hearts and intellects are concentrated upon finding out what else she knows.

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, March 20, 1920, p. 6.

1,222,570 Different Bacteria on One House Fly

1910

U.S. Government Asks All to Swat the Fly

NEW YORK. — The whole United States government, with its vast treasury of wealth, its brainy statesmen and insurgents, its army and navy, its immense horde of highbrows, against the poor little house fly! That's the line-up in a bitter war of extermination scheduled to set the nation by the cars and enlist the courageous support of every man, woman and child in this broad land. The final knell of the house fly has been sounded and the battle has just begun. "Catch 'em and kill 'em; show no quarter" — that is the war cry of the army of extermination that is to put forth every effort to rid the land of the Musca Domestica, the polite name by which the house fly should be addressed by strangers.

Until the scientists got busy with their investigations the house fly was considered merely as a pestiferous insect, designed by the Creator of all things merely to take its bath in the sweet cream and maple syrup, annoy the late morning sleeper, skate about with abandon on the polished surface of shiny baldheads and practice the Morse telegraph code on the cleanest of windows.

Long suffering housewives since time began were the only really active enemies of the seemingly insignificant little fly, and they alone and unaided applied the imprecations and dish cloths vigorously against the nuisance. But after the scientists got onto the job the fight against the insect began to assume proportions of magnitude.

That little insect which the average citizen was wont to regard merely as a domestic pest is now branded as the most dangerous creature on earth. The house fly has been publicly indicted as a murderer of the human race, the greatest disease propagator and the carrier of more menacing and malignant germs than all other creatures put together.

This little, but potent, messenger of death wanders from the sick room, from the filth of the garbage pail, from the heaps of refuse of all kinds into the peaceful, happy homes of our land, walks upon the butter, the meat, the fruit, the sugar, takes a bath in the milk, leaving everywhere the germs of disease that have gathered upon its furry feet and body.

In experiments conducted by the New York health authorities the scientists found on the body of a single little fly 1,222,570 different bacteria, enough to kill a few thousand human beings. In another experiment a fly was caught in a sterilized net and dropped into a bottle of sterilized water. The bottle was shaken and the germs washed off the insect's body, as would be the case if the fly dropped into a glass of milk for the baby. The previously pure water was then examined and it was discovered that the fly's bath contained no less than 5,000,000 disease germs.

About half the deaths from typhoid in New York, according to the health authorities, are attributed directly to the distribution of germs by house flies. And worse than that, the figures show that of 7,000 deaths of cooing babies in that city from infantile diseases, more than 5,000 were traced to infection carried by house flies.

According to a noted scientist the extermination of the pest is comparatively easy. All that is necessary, he says, is a systematic effort on the part of the public. If all the people will practice the utmost cleanliness, it is declared, the house fly will be extinct in this country within a few years, for the house fly cannot exist without filth.

"Cleanliness," then, is the watchword for the American public to put an end to an insect that is not only a terrible nuisance, but a terrible instrument of death to thousands of our population every year.

Large Sums Wagered on Fighting Crickets

1920

Marines Back From China Tell of Orient's Popular Sport

SAN FRANCISCO, Cal. — Cricket fighting is a very popular sport in China, according to U.S. Marines who just returned here from a tour of duty in the Orient.

"The most celebrated cricket fights are those at Fa-ti, near Canton," says one of these sea-soldiers. "A number of sheds are provided, made of matting, and are divided into compartments. Each compartment contains a table with a vessel standing on it in which the encounters take place.

"Big contests are waged, the attendance is large and betting is heavy. Final results are posted conspicuously. Crickets are matched according to weight and color.

"When a cricket with a long record of victories dies its owner puts it in a tiny coffin and buries it, believing that funeral honors will assure him good luck in finding good fighting crickets."

Old Time Jokes and Something Unreadable on Beetles

1915

A Sad Case.

"This milk is blue," said the customer angrily.
"I know it, and I'm very sorry," replied the milkman, "but the weather we've been having lately has given the cows melancholia, and it shows up in the milk." — Brooklyn Citizen.


Helped Her Up.

Orchestra Leader — I never heard the prima donna do that high note as well as she did last night. Stage Manager — Nor I. You see, just as she reached it she saw a mouse in the wings.—Yonkers Statesman.


Leze Majesty.

Ann — You don't tell me that that gem of a cook left Mrs. Dust! Flo — Yes. You see, Mrs. Dust refused to change grocers when the cook and the delivery boy fell out. — Puck.


France has the best highways in Europe, Russia and Spain the worst.


How Beetles Defend Themselves.

Beetles have other defenses than their cuirass, such as nauseous or caustic liquids, which they expel on provocation, and, strange to say, certain beetles actually exude their blood, charged with noxious products. The practice is confined to the chrysomelidae, some of the timarchae and adamonia, the coccinelidae and the meloidae. The blood of the coccinelidae has a strong, disagreeable odor like that of the whole insect. That of the timarchae is odorless, but has an astringent flavor, and in the case of the timarchae primeliodes is venomous. The blood of the meloidae contains much cantharidine.

Toads Valued in France

1925

Toads, the rotund garden variety, have a market value in France. The French gardeners claim that this warty-skinned amphibian devours its weight in injurious plant insects every 24 hours, and is encouraged to live in their gardens. Killing one of these insect hunters in France is considered the height of folly.


Bleaching Beeswax

Beeswax may be bleached by running in thin ribbons through a machine and allowing it to remain in the sunlight. Some beeswax bleaches more readily than others. It will take several weeks to bleach it.


Formation of Grand Bank

The Grand bank of Newfoundland is supposed to be composed of deposits of solid matter brought from the Arctic seas by icebergs, which gradually melt by contact with the warm water of the Gulf stream.


Ranks High in Literature

The Heimskringla has been called "the most important prose work in old Norse literature." It is a history of Norse kings. Some were mythical, others real. The author was an Icelander, Snorri Sturluson (1178-1241).


Mexican Frijol

The word frijol in Spanish connotes almost any variety of cultivated beans, but in Mexico it is applied almost exclusively to the brown or spotted varieties known in English-speaking countries as kidney beans.


Bee's Average Life Six Weeks

A bee hatched in early summer does not live to eat the honey it gathers, as its average life through the busy season is not more than six weeks. Only those born in late autumn live till the spring.

—Bedford Gazette, Bedford, Pennsylvania, August 7, 1925.

Intelligence of Ants Overestimated

Stockholm, April 9. - The ant has been greatly overrated, in the opinion of Rich Ege, a Swedish naturalist. Solomon set the fashion with his famous admonition to the sluggard, and the ant has been living under false pretenses ever since. For, as matter of fact, she is a hopeless chucklehead, and to consider her ways is no way to become wise.

Mark Twain arrived at this conclusion many years ago, and science now joins hands with him in the person of Mr. Ege, who publishes the results of a series of experiments with ants. He disposes first of the insect's supposed uncanny power to recognize other tenants of its own anthill. Mr. Ege washed ants in ether, dipped them in liquid gained by pressing a number of ants from another hill, and put them back among their own friends, who promptly fell upon them and rejected them. He took ants fifty times larger than the inhabitants of a certain anthill, washed them and treated them in a liquid pressed from ants from that hill, and then placed them in it. The Lilliputian insects did not recognize the giants as invaders. Mr. Ege concludes, therefore, that the supposed remarkably sharp, recognitional powers of the insects are simply a matter of scent and inherited reflexes.

Ants removed from familiar paths blunder blindly along, with no sense of distance or direction, until they strike a trail made by other ants or themselves. In many tests made by Mr. Ege the insects disclosed, "no more intelligence than is to be found in the digestive processes of human beings." In other words, he found nearly all their acts are but movements by reflexes, unconnected with intelligence.

--The Ada Weekly News, Ada, Oklahoma, April 11, 1918, page 10.

The Harem Skirt

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The harem skirt ought to fool the mouse some.
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The farmer, unlike the consumer, goes to seed in the spring.
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Soon again the housefly will engage attention as an enemy to mankind.
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Missouri has the corncob pipe record. This, however, is not regarded as a sporting event.
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And the industrious cow has taken her place in the hall of fame beside the industrious hen.
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According to an English professor, the human race is 170,000 years old. It hasn't much sense for its age.
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Now Wellesley proposes to raise cats for laboratory purposes, why not utilize them for the glee club, also?
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The witchcraft of 200 years ago is now called malignant animal magnetism, and it is the same old article.

Advertisements from 1911:

MAPLEINE FLAVORING - Use it like lemon and vanilla. A delicious syrup is made by dissolving white sugar in water and adding Mapleine. Grocers sell Mapleine; if not, send 35c for 2 oz. bottle and recipe book. Write to Dept. H, CRESCENT MFG. CO., Seattle, Wash.

Comment: Don't really write, the offer is expired ... I assume.

For a disordered liver, take Garfield Tea, the Herb laxative. All druggists.

--The Ellis Review-Headlight, Ellis, Kansas, 1911