INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 5 
the labour of building was at this time delegated to 
the workers. The chief difficulty in following his 
account seems to arise from his not having suffi- 
ciently distinguished the species. His meaning is 
generally clear enough with regard to the social 
economy of the odjxes, but when we get to the 
av@pnvat * all is confusion, and it is not clear whether 
it is always the same insect which is thus desig- 
nated. 
Wasps and their ways have a place, though not of 
honour, in various works. The fabulous legend of 
St. Veronicat makes her cure Vespasian of a wasp’s 
nest in his nose by the sight of her miraculous cloth: 
this inconsistent silly story having been evidently 
concocted in forgetfulness that in Vespasian’s time, 
whose name the story was made to fit, vespa was 
not the familiar word for a wasp. Coming nearer to 
our own times and country, we find Olaus Magnus,} 
of Sweden, in the 16th century, devoting a chapter 
or more of his ‘Natural History of the Northern 
- Nations’ to them. He slides gradually into their 
description from that of stag-beetles, and so on, by 
a transition which seems to him equally natural, into 
that of snakes. 
The general classification is strange enough; but 
the division into large and small wasps, and the few 
touches of description are true to nature. Mallow 
* Op. cit. Book V, Chap. 20. Book IX, Chaps. 27, 28. 
+ Mrs. Jameson, ‘History of our Lord, as exemplified in Works of 
Art,’ Vol. I, p. 41, referring to an illustrated MS. in the Ambrosian 
Library at Milan. 
t ‘Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus,’ etc. Folio. Basilex, 
1567. Lib. XXII, capp. 3, 4, 
