WAYS OF NATURE 
dividuality among the solitary wasps comes about. 
May it not be because the wasps are solitary ? They 
live alone. They have no one to imitate; they are 
uninfluenced by their fellows. No community in- 
terests override or check individual whims or pecul- 
iarities. The innate tendency to variation, active in 
all forms of life, has with them full sway. Among 
the social bees or wasps one would not expect to 
find those differences between individuals. The 
members of a colony all appear alike in habits and 
in dispositions. Colonies differ, as every bee-keeper 
knows, but probably the members composing it 
differ very little. The community interests shape 
all alike. Is it not the same in a degree among men ? 
Does not solitude bring out a man’s peculiarities 
and differentiate him from others? The more one 
lives alone, the more he becomes unlike his fellows. 
Hence the original and racy flavor of woodsmen, 
pioneers, lone dwellers in Nature’s solitudes. Thus 
isolated communities develop characteristics of 
their own. Constant intercommunication, the fric- 
tion of travel, of streets, of books, of newspapers, 
make us all alike ; we are, as it were, all pebbles 
upon the same shore, washed by the same waves. 
Among the larger of vertebrate animals, I think, 
one might reasonably expect to find more individual- 
ity among those that are solitary than among those 
that are gregarious; more among birds of prey than 
among water-fowl, more among foxes than among 
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