A true manufacturing process

Philip Henry Gosse, « Contribution to the History of the Rotifera, or wheel Animalcules, Part III, The Builders (Melicertadae) », The Popular Science Review, Londres, James Samuelson, 1862, p. 485.

Thus we have here an animal of invisible minuteness which displays more than merely constructive powers. It had been surely a most interesting phenomenon if the tiny creature had forme dit cases, like the caddis-worm of our brooks, out of ready-made materials which it picked uo and apprpriated, and no more. But, in addition to this, there is the instinct of fashioning the crude materials into solidity and shape,- a true manufacturing process. Here is not only a clever architect and bricklayer who builds his symetrical house, brick by brick in regular courses, cementing each with a mortar which, like the Aberthaw lime, sets and hardens under water ; but an artisan who collects various sorts of crude substances, and, with the aid of certain machinery peculiar to himself, consolidates, compresses, and moulds them into bricks of regular form and perfectly uniform dimensions, before he makes use of them.