Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/455

 form of which are shown in Plate IX. Fig. 18. From the appearance of this paper, it is probable that the form or mould may perhaps have been made of thin rods of cane or some other vegetable. These rods, however, may have been metallic. They were placed so close, that of the water-lines produced by them 17 may be counted in the space of an inch, the water-lines at right angles to these being one inch and a quarter apart.

The preceding facts coincide with the opinion long ago expressed by Prideaux, who concluded that linen paper was an Eastern invention, because "most of the old MSS. in Arabic and other oriental languages are written on this sort of paper," and that it was first introduced into Europe by the Saracens of Spain.

A few observations, by way of concluding this part of the subject, may here be properly bestowed upon the material with which the construct their nests.

The wasp is a paper-maker, and a most perfect and intelligent one. While mankind were arriving, by slow degrees, at the art of fabricating this valuable substance, the wasp was making it before their eyes, by very much the same process as that by which human hands now manufacture it with the best aid of chemistry and machinery. While some nations carved their records on wood, and stone, and brass, and leaden tablets,—others, more advanced, wrote with a style on wax,—others employed the inner bark of trees, and others the skins of animals rudely prepared,—the wasp was manufacturing a firm and durable paper. Even when the papyrus was rendered more fit, by a process of art, for the transmission of ideas in writing. The paper of the papyrus was formed of the leaves of the plant, dried, pressed, and polished; ''the wasp alone knew how to reduce vegetable fibres to a pulp, and then unite them by a size or glue, spreading the substance out into a smooth and delicate leaf''. This is exactly the process of paper-making. It would seem that the wasp knows, as the modern paper-makers