“Wilson,” he wrote his teenage follower, “you’ve made a good start with your project of identifying all the species of ants found in Alabama. But it’s time to get serious about a more basic subject, where you can do original work in biology. If you’re going to study ants, get serious.” Bill, when I first came to know him, was at that time absorbed in classifying a group of species called the dacetine ants, limited mostly to the tropics and parts of the warm temperate zone.
