Frederic B. Perkins, Scrope, Or the lost Library A Novel of New York and Hartford, Boston, Roberts, 1874, p. 34.

There is a certain creature of which naturalists tell us having gregarious habits, and often found to construct for itself a kind of com, somewhat resembling that of the honey-bee. But the cells of this com, instead of storerooms and social occupants inhabit, forming an aggregate not unlike that of the social grosbeak in its greats collective nest. The separateness of the cells and the disconnected individual growth of the creatures distinguishes them from the coral insect. The form and arrangement of these cells is commonly either a pile of square tubes somewhat on the caddis-worm principe, laid upon and next eath other like sticks in a wood pile, and penetrable from end to end, or else of half-tubes piled in the same way, but shut apart in the middle. The creatures are men and women. The tubes are the four-room tenements that run through a tenement-house from front to rear, the front and back rooms open by windows to the…