Packard.] 
INSECTS AS ARCHITECTS. 
295 
U* Insects as 
A N historical sketch of human architecture would 
/~\ scarcely begin with a description of the capitol at 
Washington, or of Westminster Abbey, or the still 
incomplete cathedral of Cologne, but would rather extend 
back to the earliest forms of human shelter, even to the 
pile dwellings of prehistoric Switzerland ; nor would the 
historian disregard the rock shelters of Europe and this 
country, or the caves of Dordogne. In his accounts of the 
rise of the art of building he would be obliged to treat the 
subject after the method of the paleontologist, and recon¬ 
struct the primitive dwellings of the men of the reindeer 
period from the scanty relics of their age, with the aid of 
the huts and wigwams of savage tribes now living. Work¬ 
ing out these problems, he would then reconstruct in the 
imagination the vast structure of Stonehenge, the palaces of 
the Aztecs, and would then be prepared to deal with the rise 
of architecture in Egypt, India and Greece. 
So we may study the subject of insect architecture in the 
light of paleontology, and finding in the rocks the remains 
of lost tribes, judge what manner of builders they might 
have been by the work of their survivors of the present 
day, whose forms for aught we know are little superior to 
those of their ancestors of Devonian times, just as the sav¬ 
age of to-day is perhaps scarcely a step in advance of the 
wearer of the skull of Tuolumne valley, or the cave of 
Neanderthal. 
Without much doubt the first cave-dweller was some Po- 
duran (Fig. 230) or a Campodea-like being, if such lived in 
Presilurian times. They were the troglodytes of that misty 
period, living in holes in the earth, which wound their devi- 
"7 
