52 NATURAL HISTORY OF WASPS. 
be no occasion to divert the word from its literal mean- 
ing, as it stands in our translation. For there were 
hornets in Palestine in Joshua's time. The name 
Zoreah “the place of hornets,” a city in Judah's 
inheritance, records the fact.* The latest travellers 
assure us that hornets are to be found in abundance 
throughout the country ;¢ and among their collections 
I am told that our own English hornet is to be recog 
nized. Mr. Tristram, whose delightful book has 
given yet a fresh interest to the Holy Land, and to 
whom naturalists owe a debt of gratitude for clearmg 
up the difficulty about the Unicorn by discovering the 
bones of the Aurochs,} has not left this question of 
the hornets unnoticed. He found four kinds of 
hornets, all, he says, different from our indigenous 
species, two building in the air like our tree-wasps and 
hornets, and two underground. They were decidedly 
larger than ours, and one of their combs measured 18 
inches across. Quiet when unprovoked, the fury of 
their attack when they are disturbed makes a hasty 
retreat the only preventive of a complete rout of the 
camp.§ 
It should be observed that, for the most part, ob- 
jections are not made to the Scripture assertion that 
* Joshua xv, 33. 
+ ‘Stanley Lectures on the Jewish Church.’ 2nd edition, vol. i, 
p. 212. 
t ‘The Land of Israel.’ 2nd edition, p. 11. 
§ ‘The Natural History of the Bible,’ p. 822. To the expression 
of my admiration of Mr. Tristram’s labours in Scripture Natural 
History, I must add my grateful sense of his courtesy in giving me 
every information in his power on this subject. Naturalists look 
forward with great interest to the publication of his scientific work 
on the ‘ Fauna and Flora of the Holy Land.’ 
