EXCAVATED ARCHITECTURE. 



glue with which she is provided as to possess, when finished, 

 the solidity of a single piece. Thus proceeding, she completes 

 her ten or dozen cells, closing her main entrance by a barrier 

 of the like material; and then, leaving the rest to Nature, 

 that parent careful as herself, the process of development 

 proceeds, and larva, pupa, and perfect bee make their appear- 

 ance, each in due course, within their prepared nurseries. The 

 lowest of these apartments, having had laid within it the first 

 egg, is the first, of course, to have a living tenant. How, 

 when arrived at maturity before his junior and superincumbent 

 brothers, is this winged apian to issue forth ? He possesses in 

 his jaws the trenchant tool, an heir-loom in his family ; but air 

 and use are requisite to give it edge and hardness : it will cut 

 through his sawdust floor, but not through surrounding wood. 

 But see within the latter, at the bottom of the cells, " a 

 lateral opening," bored with prospective foresight by the 

 parent " carpenter " to meet this very exigency. 



Who has not heard or read of the rock-hewn temples of the 

 East ? of the far-famed cave of Elephanta, that masterpiece 

 of excavated architecture, with its pillars and pilasters, its 

 statues, its relievos of gigantic bulk, cut, all, out of the living- 

 stone (when, who knows ?) by that dwarf in comparison of 

 these his works, that ephemera in comparison with their 

 duration, Man ? But there are insects of another sort who 

 have been working in ages as remote, and who work still, at 

 excavated structures which, as measured with their own 



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