The Mason- Wasps 



that would do credit to a discerning in- 

 dustry capable of realizing the why and 

 wherefore of things. Can the caterpillar 

 be said to have any conception, however 

 slight, of the importance of its task, of the 

 future function of its overlapping conical 

 palisades? This is what we are about to 

 learn. 



I take a pair of scissors and remove the 

 conical extremity while the spinner is work- 

 ing at the other end. The cocoon is now 

 wide open. The caterpillar soon turns 

 about. It thrusts its head into the wide 

 breach which I have just made; it seems 

 to be exploring the outside and enquiring 

 into the accident that has occurred. I ex- 

 pect to see it repair the disaster and en- 

 tirely reconstruct the cone destroyed by my 

 scissors. It does, in fact, work at it for a 

 time; it erects a row of converging threads; 

 then, without paying further heed to the 

 disaster, it applies its spinnerets elsewhere 

 and continues to thicken the cocoon. 



Grave doubts come to my mind: the cone 

 built upon the breach consists of sparse 

 filaments; it is, moreover, very flat and does 

 not project anything like so much as the 

 original cone. What I took at first to be a 

 work of repair is merely a work of con- 

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