he facts to support us, let us philosophize a little.
We have here, recognized as of excellent standard by all the expert
classifiers, so fastidious in the arrangement of their lists, a generic
group, called Anthidium, containing two guilds of workers entirely
dissimilar in character: the cotton-fullers and the resin-kneaders. It
is even possible that other species, when their habits are better known,
will come and increase this variety of manufactures. I confine myself to
the little that I know and ask myself in what the manipulator of cotton
differs from the manipulator of resin as regards tools, that is to
say, organs. Certainly, when the genus Anthidium was set down by
the classifiers, they were not wanting in scientific precision: they
consulted, under the lens of the microscope, the wings, the mandibles,
the legs, the harvesting-brush, in short, all the details calculated
to assist the proper delimitation of the group. After this minute
examination by the experts, if no organic differences stand revealed,
the reason is that they do not exist. Any dissimilarity of structure
could not escape the accurate eyes of our learned taxonomists. The
genus, therefore, is indeed organically homogeneous; but industrially it
is thoroughly heterogeneous. The implements are the same and the work is
different.

That eminent Bordeaux entomologist, Professor Jean Perez, to whom I
communicated the misgivings aroused in my mind by the contradictory
nature of my discoveries, thinks that he has found the solution of the
difficulty in the conformation of the mandibles. I extract the following
passage from his volume, "Les Abeilles":

'The cotton-pressing females have the edge of their mandibles cut out
into five or six little teeth, which make an instrument admirably suited
for scraping and removing the hairs from the epidermis of the plants. It
is a sort of comb or teasel. The resin-kneading females have the edge of
the mandible not toothed, but simply curved; the tip alone, preceded
by a notch which is pretty clearly marked in some species, forms a real
tooth; but this tooth is blunt and does not project. The mandible, in
short, is a kind of spoon perfectly fitted to remove the sticky matter
and to shape it into a ball.'

Nothing better could be said to explain the two sorts of industry: in
the one case, a rake which gathers the wool; in the other, a spoon
which scoops up the resin. I should have left it at that and felt quite
conten