WAYS OF NATURE 



dividuality among the solitary wasps comes about. 

 May it not be because the wasps are solitary ? They 

 live alone. They have no one to imitate; they are 

 uninfluenced by their fellows. No community in 

 terests override or check individual whims or pecul 

 iarities. The innate tendency to variation, active in 

 all forms of life, has with them full sway. Among 

 the social bees or wasps one would not expect to 

 find those differences between individuals. The 

 members of a colony all appear alike in habits and 

 in dispositions. Colonies differ, as every bee-keeper 

 knows, but probably the members composing it 

 differ very little. The community interests shape 

 all alike. Is it not the same in a degree among men ? 

 Does not solitude bring out a man s peculiarities 

 and differentiate him from others ? The more one 

 lives alone, the more he becomes unlike his fellows. 

 Hence the original and racy flavor of woodsmen, 

 pioneers, lone dwellers in Nature s solitudes. Thus 

 isolated communities develop characteristics of 

 their own. Constant intercommunication, the fric 

 tion of travel, of streets, of books, of newspapers, 

 make us all alike ; we are, as it were, all pebbles 

 upon the same shore, washed by the same waves. 



Among the larger of vertebrate animals, I think, 

 one might reasonably expect to find more individual 

 ity among those that are solitary than among those 

 that are gregarious ; more among birds of prey than 

 among water-fowl, more among foxes than among 

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