Let us next consider the Agenia, who rivals the Pelopæus as a huntress and a worker in clay. She encloses the one Spider who forms her larva’s ration in an [[223]]earthenware shell hardly as large as a cherry-stone and embellished on the outside with a tiny milled pattern. This little gem of ceramics is an ellipsoid truncated at one end. When the structure stands alone, its accuracy of form is perfect.
But the potter’s ware does not end with this. The place of refuge discovered in some crevice in a sunny wall is a valuable site, where the whole family will take up its abode. More preserve-jars are therefore fashioned, sometimes arranged in a row, sometimes collected in a group. Though constructed according to a fixed type, the ellipsoid, the new structures depart, some more, some less, from the ideal model. Welded together, end to end, they lose the smooth nipple of the ellipse and replace it by the sudden truncation of the barrel. When they are joined lengthwise, the belly of the barrel becomes flattened; when they are massed together anyhow, they become almost unrecognizable. Nevertheless, as the Agenia, unlike the Pelopæus, never covers her collection of pots with a casing, her work retains its distinctive features fairly well, thanks to the thoroughness with which the artist has stamped her trade-mark upon it. [[224]]
The pottery of the Eumenes is of a higher order: it favours a bulging cupola, like that of the Turkish kiosk or the Moscow basilica. At the summit of the dome is a short opening, like the mouth of an amphora, through which the caterpillars intended for the larva’s consumption are introduced. When the larder is full and the egg slung from the ceiling by a thread, the bell-mouthed neck of the cell is closed with a clay stopper.
As a rule, in these parts, E. Amadei builds on a big pebble. She adorns her cupola with angular bits of gravel, half buried in the plaster; on the stopper closing the mouth she places a little flat stone, or even a Snail-shell, selected from among the smallest. The earthenware casemate, well-baked by the sun, is supremely graceful.
Well, this elegant structure is doomed to disappear. Around her cupola the Eumenes builds others, using as walls what she has already built. Henceforth the exact circular form is no longer practicable. In order to occupy the reentrant angles, the new cells themselves become angular and assume an undecided, polyhedral form. Only the edges of the mass and the top retain traces of the regulation plan. The [[225]]nest as a whole shows a nippled surface encrusted with broken flint. Each nipple corresponds with a cell, which may always be known by its amphora-like mouth, a part which is not misshapen, because it has been fashioned without impediment. In the absence of this certificate of origin, we should hesitate before recognizing the work of an expert dome-builder in the shapeless blob.
E. unguiculata does worse. After building, on some big stone, a group of cells which, in shape, ornamental encrustation and bell-mouthed neck, rival those of E. Amadei, she buries the whole under a layer of mortar. She imitates the Chalicodoma and the Pelopæus, who, for reasons of domestic safety, follow up artistic daintiness with the uncouthness of the fortress. Inspired by a system of æsthetics which nothing is able to evade, both insects begin by creating beauty; dominated by the fear of danger, they end by creating ugliness.
Other Eumenes, on the contrary, of smaller size, build cells which are always isolated and which often have the twig of a shrub for a support. The structure is a cupola, similar to those already mentioned, and, like them, provided with a graceful neck, but without the gravel mosaic. The [[226]]tiny fabric, no bigger than a cherry, does not admit of this rustic ornamentation. The potter replaces it by a few specks of clay distributed here and there.
The Eumenes who build a succession of cells in groups are compelled to deform the chamber under construction according to the space left by those preceding it; for the beautiful curve of their original design they substitute, by force of circumstances, the unpleasing broken line. The others, those who build each cell in isolation, are far from perpetrating such inaccuracies. From first to last, as many as the establishment of the larvæ requires, now on this twig, now on that, the cells are built of an identical shape, just as though they had issued from the same mould. Now that nothing hinders the exact application of the rules, order returns and produces a series of structures which are no less perfect at the end than at the beginning.
If the insect were to build a general shelter, in which each larva had its individual box, what would this building, this common home of the family, be? On condition, of course, that no obstacle intervene, the work will always be correct in its geometry, which will vary according to the builder’s speciality. [[227]]I could draw you a child’s balloon than which none prettier was ever inflated in toyland, or, for that matter, in fairyland; and it would be exactly like the nest of a Median Wasp (Vespa media, De Geer). The person who gave me this marvel found it hanging from the lower edge of a shutter which was left open for the greater part of the year.
Possessing liberty of action in all directions, except at the point of contact with the shutter, the Wasp followed the rules of her art without impediment. With a paper of her own manufacture, tough and flexible as the silk papers of China and Japan, she contrived to expand her work into a segment of an ellipsoid, with a cone added to it by means of a gentle curve. A like association of forms artistically combined is found in the Sacred Beetle’s pears.[1] The slender Wasp and the heavy Dung-beetle, employing dissimilar tools and materials, work after the same pattern.