"Yes; but here I ought to tell you that it was a long time before men found out what she made it of. Do you remember my telling you of a gentleman who watched the little cloak-maker to see how he made his garment? Well, this gentleman, whose name was Reaumur, was trying for twenty years, he says, to find out how the wasp made paper, before he succeeded. At last, one day, he saw a female wasp alight on the sash of his window and begin to gnaw the wood; he watched her, and saw that she pulled off from the wood fibre after fibre, about the tenth part of an inch long, and not so large as a hair. She gathered these up into a knot with her feet, and then flew to another part of the sash, and went to work, stripping off more fibres or threads, and putting them to the bundle she had already. At last he caught her, to examine the bundle, and found that its colour was exactly like that of a wasp's nest; but the little ball was dry; she had not yet wetted it to make a pulp of it which could be spread out. He noticed another thing, that this bundle was not at all like wood gnawed by other insects; it was not sawdust, but threads of some little length bruised into lint. He then set to work himself with his penknife, and very soon scraped and bruised some of the wood of the same window-sash, so as to make a little ball exactly like the wasp's. Mr. Reaumur thought that this was the stuff out of which the wasp made paper, and it has since been found out that he was right. The animal wets its little bundle of bruised wooden fibres or threads with a kind of glue that it has, and this makes it stick together like pulp or paste; and while it is soft, the wasp walks backwards, and spreads it out with her feet and her tongue, until she has made it almost as thin as the thinnest paper. With this she lines the top of the hole in which she is going to build her nest, for she always begins at the top. But this is so thin that it would be too weak to keep the dirt from falling in; and therefore she goes on spreading her papers one upon the other until she has made the wall nearly two inches thick. These pieces are not laid exactly flat on each other like two pieces of pasteboard, but with little open spaces between, being joined at the edges only. This is the ceiling; and when it is finished she begins to build what may be called the highest floor of the nest; this she makes of the same paper in a great number of little cells all joined together at the sides; and instead of fastening this floor to the sides of the nest, she hangs it to the ceiling by rods made also out of this paper: these rods are small in the middle, and grow larger towards the ends, so as to be stronger. Here is a drawing of one.
The Cut represents one of the Rods from which the Floors are suspended.
She then makes a second floor, and hangs it under the first by rods as before; and the whole of it, when finished, if it should be cut straight through the middle, would appear something like the following picture of one which I made some years ago."
Section of the Social-Wasp's Nest.—aa, the outer wall; b, cc, five small terraces of cells for the neuter wasps; dd, ee, three rows of large cells for the males and females.
"This is a very ingenious little paper-maker. Uncle Philip."