[Footnote 198:  Darwin (Animals and Plants, XVIII) says:  “I have never heard of the dormouse breeding in captivity.”]

[Footnote 199:  Varro makes no mention of tea and bread and butter as part of the diet of a dormouse; so we are better able to understand his abstinence at the mad tea party in Alice in Wonderland.  As Martial (III, 58) calls him somniculosus, it is probable that his table manners on that occasion were nothing new and that his English and German names were always justified.]

[Footnote 200:  This is one of Varro’s puns which requires a surgical operation to get it into one’s head.  Appius is selected to talk about bees because his name has some echo of the sound of apis, the word for bee.]

[Footnote 201:  The study of bees was as interesting to the ancients as it is to us.  There have survived from among many others the treatises of Aristotle, Varro, Virgil, Columella and Pliny, but they are all made up, as Maeterlinck has remarked, of “erreurs charmantes,” and for that reason the antique lore of bees is read perhaps to best advantage in the mellifluous verses of the fourth Georgic, which follow Varro closely.]

[Footnote 202:  He might have said also that the hexagonal form of construction employed by bees produces the largest possible result with the least labour and material.  Maeterlinck rehearses (La Vie des Abeilles, 138) the result of the study of this problem in the highest mathematics: 

“Reaumur avait propose au celebre mathematicien Koenig le problem suivant:  ’Entre toutes les cellules hexagonales a fond pyramidal compose de trois rhombes semblables et egaux, determiner celle qui peut etre construite avec le moins de matiere?’ Koenig trouva qu’une telle cellule avait son fond fait de trois rhombes dont chaque grand angle etait de 109 degres, 26 minutes et chaque petit de 70 degres, 34 minutes.  Or, un autre savant, Maraldi, ayant mesure aussi exactement que possible les angles des rhombes construits par les abeilles fixa les grands a 109 degres, 28 minutes, et les petits a 70 degres, 32 minutes.  Il n’y avait done, entre les deux solutions qu’une difference de 2 minutes.  II est probable que l’erreur, s’il y en a une, doit etre imputee a Maraldi plutot qu’aux abeilles, car aucun instrument ne permet de mesurer avec une precision infaillible les angles des cellules qui ne sont pas assez nettlement definis.”

Maclaurin, a Scotch physicist, checked Koenig’s computations and reported to the Royal Society in London in 1743 that he found a solution in exact accord with Maraldi’s measurements, thereby completely justifying the mathematics of the bee architect.]

[Footnote 203:  The Romans were as curious and as constant in the use of perfumes as we are of tobacco.  It is perhaps well to remember that they might find our smoke as offensive as we would their unguents.]

[Footnote 204:  Indeed one of the marvels of nature is the service which certain bees perform for certain plants in transferring their fertilizing pollen which has no other means of transportation.  Darwin is most interesting on this subject.]