Date of Meeting: 15th March 2022
Location of Meeting:
The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK
Attendees:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)
Apologies:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) is an apology of a man
Motions:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) moved that motions should be skipped this month. All agreed. Motion was passed.
Toast:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) prepared the following toast to the ants in The Canon which does not quite scan properly. And it doesn't rhyme unless you accept half-rhymes in the first verse. And then mispronounce “can’t”:
There are no ants in The Canon.
That's just a simple fact.
No leafcutter. No harvester.
No common red or black.
No wood ant or carpenter.
No vicious bullet ant.
If you want to read about them
In The Canon you can't.
Presentation:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) presented the following paper about Holmes and Watson being ants:
Formidable Formicidae
On the Benefits of Ant-Thropomorphising The Canon
Introduction
At some point or another, we have all wondered how different The Canon would be if, instead of being human beings, Holmes and Watson had been ants. Sadly, apart from drawing the obvious conclusion – that Mycroft would, therefore, be a termite – the matter has never really been given the attention it deserves. Until now. I have spent the last seventeen years in intense research on this topic and am now in a position to reveal my findings. On the whole, becoming ants would have had little effect on the careers of Holmes and Watson. There were just six major differences that would have been apparent. I will go through each of them here.
Hats
Holmes and Watson were well-dressed Victorian gentlemen who never went out without a hat. As humans, Holmes and Watson would have had a cranial circumference of something like 22 inches (give or take a few inches). Significantly, ants have a much smaller head – somewhere between one and two sixteenths of an inch. This twenty-three-thousand percent decrease would have a significant impact upon the size of hats which they would wear. A standard top hat would slip over their heads and make seeing where they going incredibly difficult. But that’s not the only problem. Ants, it is true, are very strong – able to lift between ten and fifty times their own body weight. However an ant weighs about six milligrams whereas an average top hat weighs about ninety-nine-thousand-two-hundred-and-twenty-three milligrams –about ninety-nine-thousand-one-hundred-and-sixty-three milligrams too heavy for an ant.
Ant-Holmes and Ant-Watson, then, would need to find some much smaller hats in a London which generally only had milliners who catered for non-ant hat-wearers. This would likely take up so much of their time that they would have little left for detective work.
Disguises
One of Holmes’s skills that he made frequent use of was that of disguise. From drunken grooms to rising plumbers, he was a master of becoming Other Than Himself. I suspect that he would have found this much more difficult if his face bore such striking characteristics as compound eyes and vicious looking mandibles. Few would be likely to be taken in by a simple-minded Nonconformist clergyman with a hard, waterproof exoskeleton and a total height of one-eighth of an inch.
Ant-Holmes would be forced to entirely abandon this tool in his arsenal, and one wonders if his investigations would be as successful without it.
Trains
Human-Holmes made a lot of use of train which ant-Holmes would find difficult. Aside from the logistics of using public transport when you are one-eighth of an inch long and cannot speak or carry money, Holmes would also have had a great deal of difficulty telling the speed of any train he was on. In Silver Blaze Holmes dazzled Watson with his calculation of speed based upon the passing of telegraph posts. In an ant-based version of these events, the conversation would have been much less interesting:
“I have no idea how fast we are going,” said he, looking forlornly up at the window and wishing he was strong enough to carry a watch.
“Why do you not observe the quarter-mile posts,” said I.
“Because the window is many times my own height above my head and I can’t see out of it.”
Running
The fastest ants in the world are the Saharan silver ants which can manage almost two miles-per-hour. However, being English, Holmes and Watson would be more likely to be black garden ants who can only manage a fraction of this speed. Regardless, even two miles-an-hour would not be good enough when fleeing the house of Charles Augustus Milverton or pursuing bearded cyclists near Farnham – humans, after all, run at speed of about seven mile-per-hour and cycle even faster. Certainly the velocity of a terrestrial ant would have been hopeless when pursuing a thirty-five mile-an-hour hound across Dartmoor, and the duo’s ineptness would certainly have resulted in Henry Baskerville having his throat torn out. And that’s before we consider how ant-Holmes could have fired five shots into the flank of anything.
Oranges
Ant-Holmes would never have been able to deliberately knock over a dish of oranges and a carafe of water. He would simply lack the weight needed to impart any momentum to them.
Fights
Human Holmes was a master of baritsu, boxing and single-stick – skills which he frequently put to use when dealing with the villains and roughs of the criminal world. Watson too, was no coward and was quite willing to use brute-force when necessary – consider his willingness to assault Charles Augustus Milverton, for example. Still, no matter how skilled they were as pugilists, ant-Watson and ant-Holmes would have difficulty translating skill into success given the weight differences between ants and humans (on average a human is about ten-million times heavier than an ant). I strongly suspect that the outcome of the confrontation between Jack Woodley and Sherlock Holmes would have been quite different in an ant-based Canon.
Conclusion
In all, I think that The Canon would suffer greatly if Holmes and Watson were to be turned into ants. We can only be thankful that they had the good sense to be humans instead.
Any other business:
The smell of "The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)’s cat’s any other dirty business was wafting up from the litter tray at the bottom of the house so we had to cut the meeting short to deal with it.
