Ill-defined spiral bands tell us how the Wasp went to work. With her pellet of paper-pulp in her mandibles, she moved downwards in a slanting direction, following the margin of the part already constructed and leaving as she went a ribbon of her material, still quite soft and impregnated with saliva. The work was discontinued and resumed hundreds and hundreds of times, for the supply was soon exhausted. The Wasp had to go to some woody stem hard by, a stem retted by the moist air and bleached by the sun, and scrape it with her teeth; she had to tear out its fibres, to divide them, unravel them and work them up into a plastic felt. When the pellet was removed, the Wasp hastened back to resume her interrupted ribbon. There was even the collaboration of several builders. The foundress of the city, the mother, alone at the outset and absorbed by family cares, was able only to make a rough beginning of the roof; but offspring arrived, neuters, [63] eager assistants henceforth charged with the continuing and enlarging of the dwelling, in order to provide the one mother with a lodging to contain the whole of her eggs. This gang of paper-makers, coming one by one to take part in the labour, or perhaps working without any common agreement, several at a time, at different points, so far from producing confusion, achieves perfect regularity. By slow degrees the spacious dome of the summit decreases in diameter; by degrees it tapers into a cone and ends in a graceful neck. Individual and almost independent efforts result in an harmonious whole. Why? Because these building insects possess an innate geometry, an order of architecture which is known without being taught and which is constant in the same group, while varying as between one group and another. Just as much as the details of the organism, or perhaps even more so, this propensity to build according to certain determined rules characterizes the corporations known by the name of species. The Chalicodoma of the Walls has her earthen tower, the Pelopæus her twisted clay cylinder, the Agenia her urn, the Anthidium her cotton wallet, the Eumenes her open-mouthed cupola and the Wasp her paper balloon. And so with the others: each has her own art. Our builders contrive and calculate before they set to work. The insect dispenses with these preliminaries; it knows nothing of the hesitations of apprenticeship. From the laying of the first stone it is a past master of its craft. It builds with the same accuracy and the same unconsciousness as those displayed by the mollusc, which coils its shell in a scientific spiral; if nothing hinders its aims, it always achieves a graceful and wisely economical structure. But, when a number of cells mutually hamper one another, the regulation plan, without being abandoned, undergoes alterations imposed by lack of space. Massing leads to irregularity. Here, as with us, liberty makes for order and constraint for disorder.