The report of it appeared in several papers, but I do not know whether the news reached Mr.Bensington, much less whether he connected it with the general laxity of method that prevailed in the Experimental Farm.
There can be but little doubt now, that while Mr.Skinner was plying Mr.
Bensington's chicks with Herakleophorbia IV, a number of wasps were just as industriously--perhaps more industriously--carrying quantities of the same paste to their early summer broods in the sand-banks beyond the adjacent pine-woods.

And there can be no dispute whatever that these early broods found just as much growth and benefit in the substance as Mr.Bensington's hens.

It is in the nature of the wasp to attain to effective maturity before the domestic fowl--and in fact of all the creatures that were--through the generous carelessness of the Skinners--partaking of the benefits Mr.Bensington heaped upon his hens, the wasps were the first to make any sort of figure in the world.
It was a keeper named Godfrey, on the estate of Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Hick, near Maidstone, who encountered and had the luck to kill the first of these monsters of whom history has any record.

He was walking knee high in bracken across an open space in the beechwoods that diversify Lieutenant-Colonel Hick's park, and he was carrying his gun--very fortunately for him a double-barrelled gun--over his shoulder, when he first caught sight of the thing.

It was, he says, coming down against the light, so that he could not see it very distinctly, and as it came it made a drone "like a motor car." He admits he was frightened.