EXCAVATED ARCHITECTURE. 321 



glue with which she is provided as to possess, when finished, 

 the solidity of a single piece. Thus proceeding, she completes 

 her ten or dozen cells, closing her main entrance by a barrier 

 of the like material ; and then leaving the rest to Nature, 

 that parent careful as herself, the process of development 

 proceeds, and larva, pupa, and perfect bee make their appear- 

 ance, each in due course, within their prepared nurseries. The 

 lowest of these apartments, having had laid within it the first 

 egg, is the first, of course, to have a living tenant. How, 

 when arrived at maturity before his junior and superincumbent 

 brothers, is this winged apian to issue forth ? He possesses in 

 his jaws the trenchant tool, an heir-loom in his family ; but air 

 and use are requisite to give it edge and hardness : it will cut 

 through his sawdust floor, but not through surrounding wood. 

 But see within the latter, at the bottom of the cells, "a 

 lateral opening," bored with prospective foresight by the 

 parent "carpenter" to meet this very exigency. 



Who has not heard or read of the rock-hewn temples of the 

 East ? of the far-famed cave of Elephanta, that masterpiece 

 of excavated architecture, with its pillars and pilasters, its 

 statues, its relievos of gigantic bulk, cut, all, out of the living 

 stone (when, who knows ?) by that dwarf in comparison of 

 these his works, that ephemera in comparison with their 

 duration, Man ? But there are insects of another sort who 

 have been working in ages as remote, and who work still, at 



excavated structures which, as measured with their own 

 YOL. III. 20. 



