mystery of mysteries, and would seem to partake of the principle, modified, of that developed in the aphides, where the vital power passes on through successive generations by the efficiency of the energy of one ancestral intercourse. In the hive bee this is not the case, but in these the one espousal fertilizes eggs to the number of often a hundred thousand, yet undeveloped and even indiscernible by the aid of the microscope in the ovaries of the queen, and which become bees progressively in the course of a couple of years, the supposed duration of her existence, during the whole of which time she is laying. The accepted male is destroyed by the effects of the amour, and when all the queens which are to be the heads of independent communities are successively fertilized, and have led forth their colonies, the remaining drones issue compulsively from the hive and are lost in the wideness of nature, and die by the natural limitation of their existence, or become the prey of their numerous enemies. The neuters or workers are, as it were, emanations of the queen, or the organs whereby her several functions as a mother are performed, considering the species as restricted to two sexes, and thus they comprise with her, collectively, one organic whole. That this is a consistent view of their condition is further proved by the circumstance that from their larvæ, upon the failure of a queen, a new queen is produced upon one being supplied with a certain nutriment that developes the capacity that would remain inert and abortive, were it not thus promoted from its primary state. It may be questioned whether the eggs deposited by the queen in the royal cells are other than neuter eggs, their subsequent nature being changed by the different quality of the sustenance they are fed with when hatched, as is the case in the above noticed defection of a queen. This then would limit the queen’s eggs to the eggs of neuters and of drones, thus further corroborating the idea of the existence of but two sexes.