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So burns the vengeful hornet, soul all o'er, 

 Repulsed in vain, and thirsty still for gore : 

 Bold son of air and heat, on angry wings 

 Untamed, untired, he turns, attacks, and stings. 



But in the southern counties plenty of them are still 

 to be found, especially where old woods, hollow 

 trees, and thatched buildings abound. In Surrey, 

 within the last two or three years, I have seen 

 abundance of them. The warm sandy soil, the old 

 pollard trees, the commons overgrown with woods, 

 and the general prevalence of wood, seem to en- 

 courage these formidable insects. In the hot summer 

 of 1837 I observed numerous nests in the woods 

 about Esher, Bookham-common, Cobham, and that 

 neighbourhood. Swarms of them visited our garden, 

 attracted in the first instance by a large dahlia, of a 

 dark-coloured flower, called the negro-boy, 

 crreen bark of this peculiar variety of dahlia had 

 some irresistible charm for them. They peeled it 

 off as the rabbit peels the bark of a young tree; and 

 wherever they laid bare the root of the stem, they 

 were succeeded by swarms of flies and wasps to suck 

 the juice. Though we destroyed numbers of them, 

 nothing would deter them from their attacks on the 

 dahliartill ripening fruits drew off their attention. 

 By the side of these noble-looking insects, of a rich 

 orange hue, the wasps appeared pale pigmies ; and 

 I observed that the hornets did not hesitate oc- 

 casionally to seize on the wasps, and carry them off. 

 It is curious to watch these insects at their nest, 

 which is generally in a hole in a tree. At the 



