CHAPTER III. 



ARCHITECTURE IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM. 



1. A General Survey of the Building Activity of 

 Animals. 



THE houses of animals are exceedingly simple and 

 destined for very prosaic purposes ; they merely 

 serve the wants of daily life, the preservation of the 

 individual and of the species. To their owners they 

 are necessary helps in the struggle for existence ; they 

 never aim at art for art's sake. 1 This clearly shows, 

 that in the animal kingdom we can speak only meta- 

 phorically of architecture properly so called. There 

 is mere mechanical skill, but not art ; and if some- 

 times its productions bear a faint resemblance to works 

 of human art, the aesthetic effect is never either intended 

 or understood by the animal. Another essential point of 

 difference between the artistic skill of animals and of 

 man is in this, that with animals it is due to an innate, 

 hereditary aptitude which has not first to be acquired, 

 as is the case with man. At its birth the animal is 

 endowed with all its artistic talents. It applies them 

 without previous experience or instruction, as soon as 

 demanded by its organic development and by external 

 circumstances. The caterpillar of the emperor moth 

 (Saturnia} begins to be an artist only, when the time 

 has arrived to transform itself into a chrysalis, and to 

 weave a bottle-shaped case wherein it is to undergo 



*) The buildings of the Australian Tectonarchinae are no exception 

 to this rule, if we divest descriptions of them of all poetical additions. 



