"Man's attainments in his own concerns,
Matched with the expertness of the brutes in theirs,
Are ofttimes vanquished and thrown far behind."

Perhaps man has never made a structure as perfect in all its
adaptations as the honeycomb. Yet when Virgil spoke of the belief that
bees have a portion of the mind divine, nothing was known of the
wonderful mathematical properties of this beautiful fabric; and the
demonstration of them which has been made within the present century is
beyond the comprehension of far the larger part of mankind. If the bee
comprehended the problem which it has been working out for these many
ages before man was able to solve it, would its intellectual powers be
inferior to his in degree, if they were the same in kind? The
water-spider weaves for herself a cocoon, makes it impervious to water,
and fastens it by loose threads to the leaves of plants growing at the
bottom of a still pool. She carries down air in a bag made for this
purpose, till the water is expelled from the cell through the opening
below. The spider lived quite dry in her little air-chamber beneath the
water ages before the diving-bell was invented; but that she understood
anything of the doctrines of space and gravity, no one would venture to
assert.

It has been the belief of some philosophers, and poets as well, that
man has taken the hint for some of the arts he now practises from the
brute creation. Democritus represents him as having derived the arts of
weaving and sewing from the spider, and the art of building of tempered
clay from the swallow; and we also read in Pliny's "Natural History,"
that the nest of the swallow suggested to Toxius, the son of Coelus,
the invention of mortar. According to Lucretius, men learned music from