In point of fact, they meet man half-way.  Let us imagine that we had for centuries past been erecting cities, not with stones, bricks, and lime, but with some pliable substance painfully secreted by special organs of our body.  One day an all-powerful being places us in the midst of a fabulous city.  We recognise that it is made of a substance similar to the one that we secrete, but, as regards the rest, it is a dream, whereof what is logical is so distorted, so reduced, and as it were concentrated, as to be more disconcerting almost than had it been incoherent.  Our habitual plan is there; in fact, we find everything that we had expected; but all has been put together by some antecedent force that would seem to have crushed it, arrested it in the mould, and to have hindered its completion.  The houses whose height must attain some four or five yards are the merest protuberances, that our two hands can cover.  Thousands of walls are indicated by signs that hint at once of their plan and material.  Elsewhere there are marked deviations, which must be corrected; gaps to be filled and harmoniously joined to the rest, vast surfaces that are unstable and will need support.  The enterprise is hopeful, but full of hardship and danger.  It would seem to have been conceived by some sovereign intelligence, that was able to divine most of our desires, but has executed them clumsily, being hampered by its very vastness.  We must disentangle, therefore, what now is obscure, we must develop the least intentions of the supernatural donor; we must build in a few days what would ordinarily take us years; we must renounce organic habits, and fundamentally alter our methods of labour.  It is certain that all the attention man could devote would not be excessive for the solution of the problems that would arise, or for the turning to fullest account the help thus offered by a magnificent providence.  Yet that is, more or less, what the bees are doing in our modern hives.*

As we are now concerned with the construction of the bee, we may note, in passing, a strange peculiarity of the Apis Florea.  Certain walls of its cells for males are cylindrical instead of hexagonal.  Apparently she has not yet succeeded in passing from one form to the other, and indefinitely adopting the better.

[102]

I have said that even the policy of the bees is probably subject to change.  This point is the obscurest of all, and the most difficult to verify.  I shall not dwell on their various methods of treating the queens, or the laws as to swarming that are peculiar to the inhabitants of every hive, and apparently transmitted from generation to generation, etc.; but by the side of these facts which are not sufficiently established are others so precise and unvarying as to prove that the same degree of political civilisation has not been attained by all races of the domestic bee, and that, among some of them, the public spirit still is groping its way, seeking perhaps another solution