ANECDOTE OF A WASP. 93 



its capacity of adapting means to ends. 1 The doctor saw, on 

 his gravel walk, a Wasp with a Fly nearly as big as itself. 

 Kneeling down, he distinctly observed it cut off the head 

 and abdomen of its prey, and then, taking up the trunk to 

 which the wings remained attached, fly away ; but a breeze of 

 wind acting upon the wings of the Fly, turned round the Wasp 

 with its burthen, and impeded its progress. Upon this, it 

 again alighted, sawed off first one wing, and then the other, 

 and having thus removed the cause of its embarrassment flew 

 off with its booty. In the above instance the Wasp seemed to 

 have omitted a part of its usual operation on the bodies of 

 captured Flies, all the wings of which we have several times 

 seen them thus dexterously cut off. 



Let us now return to the hole in the bank and the giantess 

 of her kind who disappeared within it. At her business there 

 we may now make a tolerable guess, namely, that, as survivor 

 of an old house, and sole foundress of a new one, she was 

 employed in laying its foundations, having availed herself, as is 

 not uncommonly the case, of the previous labours of a mouse, 

 to save her own, in the preparatory business of excavation. 



This subterranean area being found or formed, her next 

 operation is to lay within it the foundations or walls of her 

 intended city. For this purpose, earth is a material which will 

 not serve her turn, and the nature of that which she employs 

 was long a puzzle. The substance of which the walls and cells 

 of a vespiary are constructed is now, however, ascertained to be 

 none other than paper formed of wood-raspings, mixed with a 

 sort of size, worked to a paste, and subsequently spread into 

 sheets by the Insect fabricator. 



We have continually noticed, and any one in summer-time 

 may do the same, a Wasp busily at work with its jaws upon 

 an old paling or window frame. Now, many may suppose that 

 there is little in this worthy of observation ; but simply from 

 notice of this trifling and common circumstance did Reaumur 

 1 Quoted by Kirby and Spence. 



