THE ORIGINAL PAPER-MAKERS. 



By Charles Macnamara, Arnprior, Ont. 



It has often been pointed out that the most in- 

 dispensible substance in the world for mankind is 

 the green coloring matter of plants known as 

 chlorophyll, for it alone can transform the innutrit- 

 ious solids of the earth and gases of the air into 

 food for us and for the animals we prey upon. But 

 immediately after the food-prcducing chlorophyll 

 must be ranked as ne.xt in importance another 

 vegetable product, cellulose. This material forms 

 the greater part of the rigid skeleton of trees that 

 we call wood, and is the principal constituent of all 

 vegetable fibres, such as cotton, linen and hemp. 

 The timber with which we build and furnish our 

 houses is mostly cellulose, and all our textile fabrics 



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Thf light streaks show where V. maculata has 

 been gathering wood fibre. 



of vegetable origin are practically pure cellulose. 

 And besides providing mankind with such primative 

 necessities as shelter and clothing, of the countless 

 commodities demanded by modern society, it supplies 

 a large number, ranging from high explosives to 

 artificial silk. But of all these more sophisticated 

 products of cellulose, the most vital to the civiliza- 

 tion of to-day is undoubtedly paper. 



The supreme importance of paper in the modern 

 world is not always realized. True, the rulers of 

 Germany know now that even a scrap of it may be 

 of the gravest import; but that the whole fabric of 

 civilization is bound together by paper is seldom 



apprehended. Paper is the guardian of all the re- 

 cords of mankind. We are the heirs of all the 

 ages, because paper has preserved our heritage for 

 us. It is the chief agent in the diffusion of know- 

 ledge, without which progress is impossible, and in 

 a thousand unconsidered ways it is woven into the 

 complex of modern culture. And yet, essential as 

 it is to man, it was not he who originally invented it. 



Apparently manufactured by the Chinese before 

 the Christian era, paper was not known in the 

 Western World until introduced by the Arabs in 

 the 8th or 9th centuries A.D., when it soon spread 

 over Europe. For hundreds of years it was made 

 principally from linen rags, but with the enormous 

 growth of newspapers in the 19th century this source 

 became inadequate, and about fifty years ago, paper 

 began to be made direct from the cellulose of wood. 

 Now vast forests are felled annually to provide us 

 with our daily portion of more or less reliable news. 



But long before the Arabs or the Chinese, count- 

 less ages even before our paleolithic grandfather 

 chipped his first stone axe, wasps were making paper 

 from the cellulose fibres of wood by practically the 

 same method as that followed in the latest improved 

 mill of to-day. The whole process of paper manu- 

 facture from wocd virtually consists in separating 

 the flexible cellulose fibres from the softer parts, 

 dissolving out the gums and oils, eliminating the 

 coloring matter, and lastly, with the addition of size 

 to give the material substance, felting the fibres into 

 sheets. The human manufacturer attains these ends 

 by means of massive machinery and corrosive chem- 

 icals. The wasp leaves it to the slow inevitable 

 chemistry of the sun and rain to free the wood of 

 gums and oils, her salivary glands provide the 

 necessary size, and she uses her powerful laws to 

 loosen and manipulate the fibres. 



As is generally known, wasps belong to the 

 Hymenoptera, that large and dominant order that 

 includes, besides our old friends the bees and ants, 

 a large number of more uncommon insects, such as 

 saw-flies, ichneumons, gall-flies, horntails and chal- 

 cids. The best paper-makers among the wasps are 

 found in the genus Vespa which comprises some 

 forty species distributed the world over, and all 

 social in their habits. Their colonies are composed 

 of queens, males and workers, similar to the com- 

 munities of their close relations, the social bees and 

 the ants. Some Vespas construct their nests in 

 hollow logs or holes in the ground, and as Nature 

 never wastes any time in works of supererogation, 



