uild 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--no more absurd than twenty similar guesses on
record. Try to imagine the gradual genesis of such myths as the
Egyptian scarabaeus and egg, or the Hindoo theory that the world
stood on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, the tortoise on
that infinite note of interrogation which, as some one expresses it,
underlies all physical speculations, and judge: must they not have
arisen in some such fashion as that which I have pointed out?

This, I say, would be the culminating point of the wasp-worship,
which had sprung up out of bodily fear of being stung.

But times might come for it in which it would go through various
changes, through which every superstition in the world, I suppose,
has passed or is doomed to pass.

The wasp-men might be conquered, and possibly eaten, by a stronger
tribe than themselves. Wh