218 SUPERSTITION, [ix. 



and sting you all to death." Vanity and ambition will 

 have prompted the threat : but it will not be altogether 

 a lie. The man will more than half believe his own 

 words; he will quite believe them when he has repeated 

 them a dozen times. 



And so he will become a great man, and a king, 

 under the protection of the king of the wasps ; and he 

 will become, and it may be his children after him, 

 priest of the wasp-king, who will be their fetish, and 

 the fetish of their tribe. 



And they will prosper, under the protection of the 

 wasp-king. The wasp will become their moral ideal, 

 whose virtues they must copy. The new chief will 

 preach to them wild eloquent words. They must sting 

 like wasps, revenge like wasps, hold altogether like 

 wasps, build like wasps, work hard like wasps, rob like 

 wasps ; then, like the wasps, they will be the terror of 

 all around, and kill and eat all their enemies. Soon 

 they will call themselves The Wasps. They will boast 

 that their king's father or grandfather, and soon that 

 the ancestor of the whole tribe was an actual wasp ; 

 and the wasp will become at once their eponym hero, 

 their deity, their ideal, their civiliser ; who has taught 

 them to build a kraal of huts, as he taught his children 

 to build a hive. 



Now, if there should come to any thinking man of 

 this tribe, at this epoch, the new thought Who made 

 the world ? he will be sorely puzzled. The conception 

 of a world has never crossed his mind before. He never 

 pictured to himself anything beyond the nearest ridge 

 of mountains; and as for a Maker, that will be a greater 

 puzzle still. What makers or builders more cunning- 

 than those wasps of whom his foolish head is full ? Of 



