If further proofs than those submitted elsewhere were needful, to demonstrate that the organ does not imply the function, that the implement does not determine the work, [57] the Odynerus group would furnish us with very remarkable evidence. With a close similarity of organization, not only in the details but also in the aggregate, a similarity which makes these insects one of the most natural genera in respect of structure, they possess a great variety of industries, bearing no relation one to the other, though carried on with the same equipment. Apart from the likeness in form, one single characteristic unites this group, whose habits are so unlike: all the Odyneri are game-hunters; they victual their families with grubs paralysed with the sting, with little caterpillars and small Beetle-larvæ. But to achieve this common end, the larder furnished with its egg and stuffed with game, how many several methods of construction! If we were better-acquainted with the biology of the genus, we should perhaps find architects of almost as many different schools as there are species. My investigations, which were dependent on opportunity, have as yet borne upon only three of the Odyneri; and these three, with the same implement, the curved, toothed pincers of their mandibles, apply themselves to the most dissimilar industries. One of them, O. reniformis, whose work I have described in an earlier chapter, digs a deep gallery in a hard soil and with the rubbish constructs, at the mouth of her well, a sort of curved chimney, with a guilloche pattern, the materials of which are afterwards again employed to close the abode. Formerly, when I made her acquaintance in front of a steep loamy bank baked by the sun, I whiled away the long hours of waiting by conversing, turn and turn about, with the Hoopoe, who taught me how to pronounce Latin, and with my Dog, who, lying in the shade of a leafy thicket, cooling his belly in the moist sand, taught me how to practise patience. The Wasp was rare and by no means prodigal of her returns to the nest where I was watching her skilful tactics. Nowadays, every spring, I have a populous colony of her before my eyes in one of the paths of my enclosure. When the period for the works arrives, I surround the hamlet with stakes to mark the site, lest heedless footsteps should destroy the pretty chimneys built of grains of earth. The second, O. alpestris, Sauss., is by trade a resin-worker. Possessing the same tool as her colleague the miner, but not the same skill, she does not dig herself a dwelling; she prefers to settle down in borrowed lodgings provided by an empty Snail-shell. The shells of Helix nemoralis, of H. aspersa, [58] when very incompletely developed, and of Bulimulus radiatus are the only dwellings that I have known her to occupy and also the only ones that would serve her turn under the stone-heaps where, in company with Anthidium bellicosum, she performs her labours in July and August.