300 INSECT OPERATIONS 



infancy, for Nature has given us abundance of patterns." In 

 the obscurity usually involving original inventions (not, per- 

 haps, after all, inventively original), it is difficult to tell how far 

 some of the above patterns, as of common exhibition in certain 

 conspicuous labours of beast and bird, may have contributed 

 to the end of teaching man; but if beavers felled timber, 

 built cabin villages, and laid dams across water, without 

 having contributed, suggestively, towards the like operations 

 among the human tribes surrounding them if the first niud- 

 hut would have been raised as early if the swallow had never 

 been instructed to build her nest of tempered clay, we may 

 engage, with yet more certainty, that the first builder of 

 cemented stone walls never took a lesson from the " mason 

 wasp" or the " mason caterpillar," although (using, in lieu of 

 mortar, the one a natural gluten, the other meshes of silk) 

 they build their walls, and have ever built them, of detached 

 blocks, exactly as we have learnt, somehow, to make our own. 

 So, in other instances, a raft was doubtless man's first contri- 

 vance, or more probably liis need suggested an expedient for 

 traversing the water ; and he by whom the experiment was 

 tried had no knowledge, it is almost certain, that a squirrel 

 and a spider had crossed each its river or its ocean by help of 

 a similar aid. 



The use of that most simple yet most powerful of instru- 

 ments, the wedge, could have been suggested by an operation 

 commonly performed by every species of bee ; yet he who first 



