VII 



THE FIRST PAPER- MAKER 



THE civilised world could hardly get on 

 nowadays without paper ; yet paper- 

 making is, humanly speaking, a very 

 recent invention. It dates, at furthest, back to the 

 ancient Egyptians. " Humanly speaking," I say, 

 not without a set purpose ; because man was 

 anticipated as a paper-maker by many millions of 

 years ; long before a human foot trod the earth, 

 there is reason to suppose that ancestral wasps 

 were manufacturing paper, almost as they manu- 

 facture it for their nests to-day, among the sub- 

 tropical vegetation of an older and warmer Europe. 

 And the wasp is so clever and so many-sided a 

 creature, that to consider him (or more accurately 

 her) in every aspect of life within the space of a 

 few pages would be practically impossible. So it 

 is mainly as a paper-manufacturer and a consumer 

 of paper that I propose to regard our slim-waisted 

 friend in this chapter. 



It is usual in human language to admit, as the 

 Latin Grammar ungallantly puts it, that " the mas- 

 culine is worthier than the feminine, the feminine 

 than the neuter." Among wasps, however, the 



