ts
game, others capturing the game and then digging the hole; some of
them hanging the spider up in the fork of a weed to keep it away from
the ants while they work at their nest, and running to it every few
minutes to see that it is safe; others laying the insect on the ground
while they dig; one species walking backward and dragging its spider
after it, and when the spider is so small that it carries it in its
mandible, still walking backward as if dragging it, when it would be
much more convenient to walk forward. A curious little people, leading
their solitary lives and greatly differentiated by the solitude,
hardly any two alike, one nervous and excitable, another calm and
unhurried; one careless in her work, another neat and thorough; this
one suspicious, that one confiding; Ammophila using a pebble to pack
down the earth in her burrow, while another species uses the end of
her abdomen,--verily a queer little people, with a lot of wild nature
about them, and a lot of human nature, too.

I think one can see how this development of individuality among the
solitary wasps comes about. May it not be because the wasps are
solitary? They live alone. They have no one to imitate; they are
uninfluenced by their fellows. No community interests override or
check individual whims or peculiarities. The innate tendency to
variation, active in all forms of life, has with them full sway. Among
the social bees or wasps one would not expect to find those
differences between individuals. The members of a colony all appear
alike in habits and in dispositions. Colonies differ, as every
bee-keeper knows, but probably the members composing it differ very
little. The community interests shape all alike. Is it not the same in
a degree among men? Does not solitude bring out a man's peculiarities
and differentiate him from others? The more one lives alone, the more
he becomes unlike his fellows. Hence the original and racy flavor of
woodsmen, pioneers, lone dwellers in Nature's solitudes. Thus isolated
communities develop characteristics of their own. Constant
intercommunication, the friction of travel, of streets, of books, of
newspapers, make us all alike; we are, as it were, all pebbles upon
the same shore, washed by the same waves.

Among the larger of vertebrate animals, I think, one might reasonably
expect to find more individuality among those that are solitary than
among those that are gregarious; more among birds of prey than amon