The wasp has been labouring at her manufacture of paper from her first creation, with precisely the same instruments and the same materials; and her success has been unvarying. Her machinery is very simple, and therefore it is never out of order. She learns nothing, and she forgets nothing. Men, from time to time, lose their excellence in particular arts, and they are slow in finding out real improvements. Such improvements are often the effect of accident. Paper is now manufactured very extensively by machinery in all its stages; and thus, instead of a single sheet being made by hand, a stream of paper is poured out, which would form a roll large enough to extend round the globe, if such a length were desirable. The inventors of this machinery, Messrs. Fourdrinier, it is said, spent the enormous sum of 40,000_l._. in vain attempts to render the machine capable of determining with precision the width of the roll; and, at last, accomplished their object, at the suggestion of a bystander, by a strap revolving upon an axis, at a cost of three shillings and sixpence. Such is the difference between the workings of human knowledge and experience, and those of animal instinct. We proceed slowly and in the dark, but our course is not bounded by a narrow line, for it seems difficult to say what is the perfection of any art; animals go clearly to a given point--but they can go no further. We may, however, learn something from their perfect knowledge of what is within their range. It is not improbable that if man had attended in an earlier state of society to the labours of wasps, he would have sooner known how to make paper. We are still behind in our arts and sciences, because we have not always been observers. If we had watched the operations of insects, and the structure of insects in general, with more care, we might have been far advanced in the knowledge of many arts which are yet in their infancy, for nature has given us abundance of patterns. We have learnt to perfect some instruments of sound by examining the structure of the human ear; and the mechanism of an eye has suggested some valuable improvements in achromatic glasses. Réaumur has given a very interesting account of the wasps of Cayenne (_Chartergus nidulans_), which hang their nests in trees.[Y] Like the bird of Africa called the social grosbeak (_Loxia socia_), they fabricate a perfect house, capable of containing many hundreds of their community, and suspend it on high out of the reach of attack. But the Cayenne wasp is a more expert artist than the bird. He is a pasteboard-maker;--and the card with which he forms the exterior covering of his abode is so smooth, so strong, so uniform in its texture, and so white, that the most skilful manufacturer of this substance might be proud of the work. It takes ink admirably.