dren not to sting you:" but--"I can ask the wasp-king, and he will
send his children, and sting you all to death." Vanity and ambition will
have prompted the threat: but it will not be altogether a lie. The man
will more than half believe his own words; he will quite believe them
when he has repeated them a dozen times.

And so he will become a great man, and a king, under the protection of
the king of the wasps; and he will become, and it may be his children
after him, priest of the wasp-king, who will be their fetish, and the
fetish of their tribe.

And they will prosper, under the protection of the wasp-king. The wasp
will become their moral ideal, whose virtues they must copy. The new
chief will preach to them wild eloquent words. They must sting like
wasps, revenge like wasps, hold all together like wasps, build like
wasps, work hard like wasps, rob like wasps; then, like the wasps, they
will be the terror of all around, and kill and eat all their enemies.
Soon they will call themselves The Wasps. They will boast that their
king's father or grandfather, and soon that the ancestor of the whole
tribe, was an actual wasp; and the wasp will become at once their eponym
hero, their deity, their ideal, their civiliser; who has taught them to
build a kraal of huts, as he taught his children to build a hive.

Now, if there should come to any thinking man of this tribe, at this
epoch, the new thought--Who made the world? he will be sorely puzzled.
The conception of a world has never crossed his mind before. He never
pictured to himself anything beyond the nearest ridge of mountains; and
as for a Maker, that will be a greater puzzle still. What makers or
builders more cunning than those wasps of whom his foolish head is full?
Of course, he sees it now. A Wasp made the world; which to him entirely
new guess might become an integral part of his tribe's creed. That would
be their cosmogony. And if, a generation or two after, another savage
genius should guess that the world was a globe hanging in the heavens, he
would, if he had imagination enough to take the thought in at all, put it
to himself in a form suited to his previous knowledge and conceptions. It
would seem to him that The Wasp flew about the skies with the world in
his mouth, as he carries a bluebottle fly; and that would be the
astronomy of his tribe henceforth. Absurd enough; but--as every man who
is acquainted with old mythical cosmogonies must know-