ARCHITECTURE. 207 
such a protection unnecessary. The dense rugged 
texture with which V. germanica keeps off the drip 
and the falling earth from her nursery when she 
builds under ground, is changed for a lighter, freer 
style of construction when she hangs her nest from 
a rafter. And so it is, too, with V. vulgaris. 
The assurance of a coming dry summer is com- 
municated to wasps by signs which we take at 
second hand from them. [am told, by a gamekeeper 
who has spent his life in a land of brooks, that the 
height at which the wasps make their nests above the 
water is a rough index of the amount of rain that is 
to be expected during the summer. In a wet season 
they choose the top of the bank; in a dry year they 
extend their range nearer to the water-level. When 
these indications, whatever they may be, induce 
V. sylvestris to build in the hole which she has 
scooped in the side of a hedge-bank instead of in 
her more usual position, she makes a much slighter 
case than when she has to provide against wind 
and rain. But the structure is still characteristi- 
cally that of the species in all these cases; and 
the nest, in whatever situation it may be placed, and 
however it may be modified to suit the requirements 
of its unusual position, bears distinctive marks of 
the workmanship of the particular kind of wasp. 
The architecture is as typical of the species as the 
markings of the insect, and the instinctive habit of 
building in one particular way is as inseparable from 
the individual as its own organs. Though an occa- 
sional alteration of the seasons may give rise to corre- 
sponding changes in the place or mode of construction, 
yet these changes, do not go so far as essentially to 
