Death Creeps the Moon
By Wede
The public has been warned about the harm which the ant-like insect, the termite, can do. It is able to wreck furniture, houses even, eating away the interior of the woodwork, but leaving the outside untouched, as a mere shell which gives to the slightest touch.
It will be recalled by a small percentage of newspaper readers—how small a percentage I hesitate to say, since many persons hold that newspapers are written, first, to be disbelieved; and, second, to be forgotten; that in September of the past year three paleontologists, whose names were Corker, Hyde, and Spada, stumbled on a puzzling, if not inexplicable, phenomenon while probing Miocene deposits in the Rigi hills of Switzerland.
The clipping follows:
MUNSTER, Switzerland, Sept. 21 (Special to the News)—Unearthal of a perfectly preserved home built by white ants during the Early Tertiary period of life on earth, at least 1,000,000 years before the advent of man, was reported here today by Dr. A. F. Corker.
Dr. Corker, who for many years has been lecturer on paleontology at Sugarloaf College in California, declares himself unable to account for the preservation of the termitarium, or any part of it, in unfossilized form.
The self-evident absurdity of this dispatch, coming as it did from a man like Corker, whom I had been ingenuous enough to consider a conservative and trustworthy scientist, roused in me a sense of irritation for which my students suffered in their ensuing seminars; and when a second dispatch, attributed this time to Hyde and Spada, reported that the scientists had cleared fifty feet of sandstone from the sides of the structure without reaching its bottom, I wired Corker, at the college's expense:
YOUR PUBLICITY-SEEKING UNTRUTHS RE MIOCENE TERMITARIUM REFLECT ON ENTIRE SUGARLOAF FACULTY STOP PLEASE RETRACT IMMEDIATELY (signed) Elwin Whitehead.
Paleontology is outside my field; indeed, rock-studies in general appeal to me as fitting amusements for children and imbeciles; but on entomology, though I say it myself, no living scholar is my equal. (I hope that Dr. Adolfus Barclay, of Pranta University, will take note, and will retract publicly his misguided, reactionary assertion that the termite, noblest of insects, should be classified as true Neuroptera. Obviously its incomplete metamorphosis makes Termitidae a sub-order of Orthoptera.)
Any schoolboy knows that these insects originated in the Miocene era, and that in all probability they will still be building nests when the last man has died of a bad liver. It is no more than they deserve. For self-sacrifice, community spirit and adaptability, give me one termite for a hundred humans any time.
There is no basis for the pretence of envious mal-contents that my fond-
