ect in the act of gathering its materials. Hard
by the stone-heaps which I turn over for my collections there is a
plentiful supply of brown-berried junipers. Pines are totally absent;
and the cypress only appears occasionally near the houses. Moreover,
among the vegetable remains which we shall see assisting in the
protection of the nest, we often find the juniper's catkins and needles.
As the resin-insect is economical of its time and does not fly far from
the quarters familiar to it, the gum must have been collected on the
shrub at whose foot the materials for the barricade have been gathered.
Nor is this merely a local circumstance, for the Marseilles nest abounds
in similar remnants. I therefore regard the juniper as the regular
resin-purveyor, without, however, excluding the pine, the cypress and
other Coniferae when the favourite shrub is absent.

The bits of gravel in the lid are angular and chalky in the Marseilles
nest; they are round and flinty in most of the Serignan nests. In
making her mosaic, the worker pays no heed to the form or colour of its
component parts; she collects indiscriminately anything that is hard
enough and not too large. Sometimes she lights upon treasures that give
her work a more original character. The Marseilles nest shows me, neatly
encrusted amid the bits of gravel, a tiny whole landshell, Pupa cineres.
A nest in my own neighbourhood provides me with a pretty Snail-shell,
Helix striata, forming a rose-pattern in the middle of the mosaic. These
little artistic details remind me of a certain nest of Eumenes Amadei
(A Mason-wasp, forming the subject of an essay which has not yet been
published in English.--Translator's Note.) which abounds in small
shells. Ornamental shell-work appears to number its lovers among the
insects.

After the lid of resin and gravel, an entire whorl of the spiral is
occupied by a barricade of incongruous remnants, similar to that which,
in the reeds, protects the row of cocoons of the Manicate Cotton-bee.
It is curious to see exactly the same defensive methods employed by two
builders of such different talents, one of whom handles flock, the
other gum. The nest from Marseilles has for its barricade bits of chalky
gravel, particles of earth, fragments of sticks, a few scraps of
moss and especially juniper-catkins and needles. The Serignan nests,
installed in Helix aspersa, have almost the same protective materials. I
see bits of gravel, the size of a lentil,