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Updated: May 1, 2025
It was his first visit there, and he passed a sweeping condemnation upon everything he saw, except a fly, a snail-shell, a caterpillar, a lemon, a piece of bread, and a wineglass, in some of the Dutch pictures. The Venus de' Medici met with no sort of favor.
These pretty bees, "with coppery skin and fleece of ruddy velvet," which establish their progeny in the hollow of a bramble stump, the cavity of a reed, or the winding staircase of an empty snail-shell, know the fixed and immutable genetic laws which we can only guess at, and are never mistaken.
They are the following: Anthidium septemdentatum, LATR., A. bellicosum, LEP., A. quadrilobum, LEP., and A. Latreillii, LEP. The first two make their nests in deserted Snail-shells; the other two shelter their groups of cells sometimes in the ground, sometimes under a large stone. We will first discuss the inhabitants of the Snail-shell.
The answer can be only this: of two lodgings at her disposal the Osmia selects the one that provides a comfortable home at a minimum outlay. She economizes her strength when restoring an old nest; she economizes it when replacing the Snail-shell by the reed.
In these conditions, the Osmia, at all times faithful to her birth-place, has little or no need to emigrate from her heap of stones and leave the shell for another dwelling which she would have to go and seek at a distance. Since there are heaps of stone there, she probably has no other dwelling than the Snail-shell.
It had a dainty, slender stalk of ebony black, and its hundred tiny leaves quivered like a shower of green water-drops in the air. There was actual joy in every trembling bit of it. "That's my sign," announced Aunt Emily with pride: "Maidenhair! It'll grow again. I've got the roots." And she said it as triumphantly as Stumper had said "snail-shell." "Of course, Aunty," Judy cried, yet doubtfully.
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. Ornamental shell-work appears to number its lovers among the insects.
We see this especially in the third case, where the presence of a solitary female in a family of twenty-six is due to the somewhat larger diameter of the corresponding Snail-shell and also, no doubt, to some mistake on the mother's part, for the female cocoon, in a series of two, occupies the upper storey, the one next to the orifice, an arrangement which the Osmia appears to me to dislike.
When Tom found they were gone, he came out of his hiding-place. 'What dangerous walking it is, said he, 'in this ploughed field! If I were to fall from one of these great clods, I should undoubtedly break my neck. At last, by good luck, he found a large empty snail-shell. 'This is lucky, said he, 'I can sleep here very well'; and in he crept.
We find it in the arrangement of the scales of a fir-cone, as in the arrangement of an Epeira's limy web; we find it in the spiral of a Snail-shell, in the chaplet of a Spider's thread, as in the orbit of a planet; it is everywhere, as perfect in the world of atoms as in the world of immensities.
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