"Ah, boys! how do you do? This is Saturday, and I have been expecting to see you come for some time."

"Why, Uncle Philip, we should have been here sooner, but we went round by the old mill; because we thought that perhaps we might find in some of the old timbers, holes bored by some of those industrious little carpenters you told us about."

"Well; and did you find any?"

"No; but we found something else, which we have brought to show you: and we have been talking about it all the way. We have not discovered any new tools among the animals, but we think we have found out a trade that some of them work at; and we wish you to tell us if we are right."

"Oh, that I will do, with pleasure, if I can. What is the trade that you think you have discovered?"

"It is paper-making, Uncle Philip. We have found this part of a wasp's nest, which we have brought along; and as you told us it was always best to notice every thing closely, we examined this, and it appeared so much like coarse paper that we thought (for we knew it was made by wasps) that man did not make the first paper in the world."

"Well, boys, that was not a bad thought. Now you see the advantage of taking notice of things, and of thinking about what you see. You are perfectly right in supposing that wasps make paper; and, if you please, we will talk this morning about the wasps."

"Oh yes, yes, by all means, Uncle Philip; and we will thank you, too."

"I must first tell you, then, that of the wasps there are several kinds. Some build their nests under ground, and some hang theirs in the air to the limb of a tree. This part of a nest which you have found belonged to the last kind; but I will tell you something about both. But before I begin let me get some drawings I have, which will help us to understand better. I have them. And now, of the wasps which build under ground. As soon as the warm season begins, the first care of the mother-wasp is to look for a fit place in which to build; and in the spring of the year she may very often be seen flying about a hole in the bank of a ditch, and looking into it. These holes which she examines are the old houses of field-mice or moles, and some persons have thought, what I expect is true, that she likes to take such old holes, because they save her a great deal of hard work. But still, as the holes are not large enough for her use, she has a great deal of labour to make them do. So she goes at once to work, digging in the hole she has chosen, and makes a winding, zigzag gallery, about two feet long, and about an inch in width. She digs out the earth, and carries it out, or pushes it out behind her as she goes on. This gallery ends in a large chamber or hole from one to two feet across when it is done: and now she is ready to begin her nest."

"Now then, Uncle Philip, she will begin to make paper, will she not?"

"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.

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."

"This is a very ingenious little paper-maker. Uncle Philip."

"Yes, boys, it is so. This of which I have been telling you is the ground-wasp. The tree-wasp makes its nest of paper prepared in the same way; and the nests are of different shapes. One makes it in a round flattened ball, not much larger than a rose, and when cut open it shows layer upon layer of leaves of the same thin grayish-looking paper. This kind is not so common, however. Here is one of their nests.

"Another makes its nest of cells placed in separate floors, but without any outer wall to keep off the rain; and the most curious thing in this nest is, that it is not placed in a horizontal way; that is, it is not placed with the floors level, because then the cells would catch the rain, and the nest would be spoiled; but it is always placed slanting, so that the rain may run off. It is always placed, too, so as to face the north or the west, and I suppose it is because the wasp knows that it is in more danger of rain from the south and the east. Here is a nest of this kind."

"Ah, Uncle Philip! this must be a kind of lazy wasp. It does not choose to take the trouble to cover up the house, and so it hangs it slanting, to make the rain run off."

"It may be so, boys; but I think that in making this wasp lazy, you make it a very sensible wasp; else how should it know that water would run down a slanting surface? But I cannot believe that it is so lazy; for, though it does not cover up the whole house in a paper shell, yet it does what no other wasp does, it covers its nest with a complete coat of shining, water-proof varnish, to prevent the rain from soaking into the cells. And putting on this varnish, I can tell you, is no trifling work. It forms a pretty large part of the labour of the whole swarm belonging to the nest; and sometimes you may see some of them at work for hours at a time, spreading it on with their tongues. No, my lads, he who wants an example of laziness, will not find it among the wasps.

"But let us come back to the paper. Hornets make paper for their nests much in the same manner as the wasps do, only it is coarser. There is, however, one kind of wasp which makes a sort of paper more curious than this which you have found. It is not a wasp found in this country at all. It is the Cayenne wasp, and so smooth, strong, and white is the outside of his nest that it appears like a card, and he is for that reason sometimes called the card-maker wasp. He hangs his nest on the branch of a tree, and it is so hard and polished on the outside that the rain rolls off from it, as if it were glass. A little hole in the lower end is left for the animal to pass in and out; and in this picture of it, which I have, a piece is left out of the side to show how the cells within are fixed."

"Well, then, Uncle Philip, we were right in thinking that wasps were the first paper-makers; and very glad we are that we saw this old piece of a wasp's nest. Who would have thought that so much could be learned by picking up this old scrap of a wasp's work!"

"Very good sense, boys, in that thought. A wise man will learn something from almost any thing. Use your eyes, and think of what you see. Now in this very trade of paper-making. I think that man would have found it out a great deal sooner if he had watched the wasps at their work. They have been excellent workmen at this business from the beginning; and man has gone on learning little by little of this very trade, as I will tell you at some other time, when he might have made a long step at once, had he but noticed wasps and hornets. We go on very slowly sometimes in learning to make a trade as perfect as it can be: the poor animal, with its knowledge such as God gave it, is often our superior. These dumb creatures cannot teach us every thing; there is a point to which they can go, and no further: but as far as they do know, their knowledge is perfect; and I make no doubt that a great many useful things not now known will hereafter be found out by watching dumb animals."