INSECTS AND CIVILIZATION 



ner in which those original paper-makers, the wasps and 

 hornets, convert a bit of timber into wood-pulp and 

 therefrom build their papery nests. 



Of course, human beings, who radically interfere with 

 and divert or eliminate natural processes, conspire to 

 make nugatory these crude methods of their fellow- 

 tenants in the House Cosmos. AVith his hand-made 

 tools and his Promethean torch, and his divine gift of 

 reasoning intelligence, man invades the domain of the 

 insect scavengers. He hews down forests. He splits up 

 and removes and converts their woods into alien forms, 

 and burns up waste and underbrush and the debris of 

 ages. This usurpation advances with civilization. Such 

 high directing intelligence in the creature and such swift 

 execution are an abnormal force in nature, whose vast, 

 gross, and patient processes are conceived upon a scale 

 of ages. Impatient civilized man operates upon a scale 

 of centuries, or even years. Nevertheless, with all his 

 overturnings, and burnings and diggings and convert- 

 ings, his usurpations, and remorseless destructions of his 

 less, and his less powerful brothers of the animal king- 

 dom, he cannot wholly dispossess them. Vast reaches 

 of the globe are still their natural domain, and the past 

 at least is largely theirs. How they strike back at the 

 lord-paramount and civilizer will presently a{)pear. 



Another field in which insects have helped to lay 

 foundations for civilization pertains to agriculture. Man 

 is unique among animals as a tiller and planter of the 

 ground. But he has received his arable soil from nature; 

 and in its preparation the inferior orders have had no 

 little part. Charles Darwin's last book sent us to the 

 earth worm to learn our indebtedness to a creature 

 universally loathed; preachers often have proclaimed 



ao 291 



