In the arts of peace, we must look to the animal world for the most perfect specimens of tools for digging, cutting, or boring. No spade is equal to the foot of the mole; and our hammers and pincers look clumsy indeed beside the woodpecker’s beak or the lobster’s claw. Moreover, the dwellings in the construction of which such tools are employed, are models of beauty and ingenuity. Symmetrically shaped pottery made of moulded mud or clay is found in Nature in the form of birds’ and insects’ nests; in the jaws of the skate is found the crushing-mill, and in the tooth of the elephant the grindstone. In the ichneumon fly and the grasshopper was perfected from the first the modern agricultural improvement on the hand-dibble, the seed-drill. It is only of late years that the use of the teasel has been superseded by machinery; and brushes and combs, buttons, hooks, eyes, stoppers, filters, &c. are all found in Nature. The principle of the diving-bell and air-tube exists in varieties of insects; birds make beds and hammocks and even sew, and the bower-bird emulates us in the construction of ornamental bowers and gardens. Graceful fans exist in plants and insects, cisterns in the traveller’s tree and the camel’s stomach, and natural examples of the balloon and parachute. In other varieties of art, Nature has stolen a march on man; certain insects make paper of different textures; the art known as ‘nature-printing’ was anticipated in the coal measures. Star-stippling, as now used in engraving to produce extra softness of effect, exists in utmost perfection in every flower petal. The caddis-worm, common in all our fresh waters, constructs for itself a circular window-grating which admits the water and yet protects the pupa from injury, an apparatus exactly like the wheel-windows of a Gothic building. There is a bird in South Africa, the Sociable Weaver-bird, which may be looked upon as a dweller in cities, each pair, up to the number of perhaps three hundred, building its own nest; while the whole community unite to form a common roof or covering of thatch made from a coarse kind of grass, to protect their habitations from the heavy tropical rains. The Driver-ants, also found in Africa, are so sensitive to the fierce heat of the sun, that when on their marches they are obliged to cross open ground, ‘they construct as they go on, a slight gallery which looks very much like the lining of a tunnel stripped of the surrounding earth;’ and if they come to thick grass which makes a shelter for them, they take advantage of it, and only resume the tunnel when they emerge on the other side. Not less wonderful than any of these are the Trap-door spiders, of which mention has been before made in this _Journal_. In making their nests, they begin by sinking a shaft in the ground; it is then lined with a silken web, and closed by a circular door, which can scarcely be distinguished from the moss and lichens which grow around.