4 NATURAL HISTORY OF WASPS. 
of the horde.* The man who misjudged Socrates as 
a Sophist could scarcely deign to understand a wasp. 
Again,t when Poverty enumerates the physical ad- 
vantages which her votaries have over those of 
wealth, and mentions wasp-like (or as we might 
render it straight, or strait, with a double meaning) 
among their other happy qualifications, this attribute 
at once turns the tables against her. -Chremylus 
winces at this, and suggests that hunger is the cause 
of the undesirable result. But, in short, no one has 
a civil word for them, and the choice of epithets 
which are offered in the Gradus to those who wish 
to write verses about them are so vituperative that 
one feels gratified, under the circumstances, that 
wasps have never become a favourite theme with 
either poets or poetasters. 
Yet there was no want of knowledge on the 
subject, and in the first systematic Natural History 
which has come down to our times, that which 
Aristotle { put forth, the observations on wasps 
compare favourably with those on many other animals 
quite as familiarly known. He was aware that the 
_ colony originated from a single wasp which survived 
the winter, and that the nest was, in the first instance, 
the sole work of this insect. He knew that the cells 
were made larger, as the season advanced, for the 
mother-wasps, which were then produced; and that 
* So Virgil, ‘Georgics, IV, 244, of the drone-bee :— 
“ Tmmunisque sedens aliena ad pabula fucus.” 
+ * Plutus, v. 561. 
t+ ‘ History of Animals,’ published about 330 B.c. I have referred 
to Cresswell’s translation, 1862, both as more generally accessible 
than the original, and as supplying, in the valuable notes and index, 
a help which every student will appreciate. 
