t without further investigation, if I had not had the curiosity to
open my boxes and, in my turn, to take a good look, side by side, at
the workers in cement and the workers in cotton. Allow me, my learned
master, to whisper in your ear what I saw.

The first that I examine is Anthidium septemdentatum. A spoon: yes, it
is just that. Powerful mandibles, shaped like an isosceles triangle,
flat above, hollowed out below; and no indentations, none whatsoever.
A splendid tool, as you say, for gathering the viscous pellet; quite as
efficacious in its kind of work as is the rake of the toothed mandibles
for gathering cotton. Here certainly is a creature potently-gifted, even
though it be for a poor little task, the scooping up of two or three
drops of glue.

Things are not quite so satisfactory with the second Resin-bee of the
Snail-shells, A. bellicosum. I find that she has three teeth to her
mandibles. Still, they are slight and project very little. Let us say
that this does not count, even though the work is exactly the same.
With A. quadrilobum the whole thing breaks down. She, the queen of
Resin-bees; she, who collects a lump of mastic the size of one's fist,
enough to subdivide hundreds of her kinswomen's Snail-shells: well, she,
by way of a spoon, carries a rake! On the wide edges of her mandibles
stand four teeth, as long and pointed as those of the most zealous
cotton-gleaner. A. florentinum, that mighty manufacturer of
cotton-goods, can hardly rival her in respect of combing-tools. And
nevertheless, with her toothed implement, a sort of saw, the Resin-bee
collects her great heap of pitch, load by load; and the material is
carried not rigid, but sticky, half-fluid, so that it may amalgamate
with the previous lots and be fashioned into cells.

A. Latreillii, without having a very large implement, also bears witness
to the possibility of heaping up soft resin with a rake; she arms her
mandibles with three or four sharply-cut teeth. In short, out of four
Resin-bees, the only four that I know, one is armed with a spoon, if
this expression be really suited to the tool's function; the three
others are armed with a rake; and it so happens that the most copious
heap of resin is just the work of the rake with the most teeth to it,
a tool suited to the cotton-reapers, according to the views of the
Bordeaux entomological expert.

No, the explanation that appealed to me so much at first is not
admissible. The mandible, whethe