314 FORMIC MASONRY. 



ported carefully, together with their foundations, from the 

 sites, usually brick walls, which they originally occupied. 

 Their variations are in the general form and position of their 

 outworks and cells,* and the materials of their composition, 

 which consist, in different specimens, of clay with particles of 

 stone, mortar, sand, and earth, but all quarried grain by grain, 

 agglutinized in masses or pellets, and compacted whilst moist 

 and adherent. They are each the work of artificers of the 

 same craft, " mason bees," who, for a similar maternal pur- 

 pose, have laboured, solitary, but, doubtless, 



" Heart-soothed and busy as a wren, 



"Who in some secret nook 

 Constructs her sight-eluding den, 

 Beside the running brook." 



Next, in the compass of a flower-pot, we see an edifice, 

 earth-built, but as widely differing from those last under notice 

 in form and structure as its ingenious architects, which are 

 not single but very numerous, differ in shape and size from the 

 mason wasps and bees at whose works we have been looking. 



We were presented in the latter with strong walls built of 

 cemented masses ; in the one before us we see not only walls 

 but arches of considerable height, of which the excellence and 

 wonder consist chiefly of their being raised of particles of 

 earth, piled up and supporting one another, without the help 

 of any adhesive substance. The building before us is, indeed, 



* See Vignette. 



