the bee, or is it the impulse of the instinct implanted by that Supreme Intelligence which gives man his reason and moulds all things to their most fitting use? Ray’s view is precisely this; he says:—“The bee, a creature of the lowest forms of animals, so that no man can suspect it to have any considerable measure of understanding, or to have knowledge of, much less to aim at, any end, yet makes her combs and cells with that geometrical accuracy, that she must needs be acted by an instinct implanted in her by the wise Author of Nature.” To support this idea of the geometrical skill of the bee, he cites “the famous mathematician Pappus,” the Alexandrian, of the time of Theodosius the Great, who “demonstrates it in the preface to his third book of _Mathematical Collections_.” “First of all (saith he, speaking of the cells), it is convenient that they be of such figures as may cohere one to another, and have common sides, else there would be empty spaces left between them to no use but to the weakening and spoiling of the work, if anything should get in there, and therefore though a round figure be most capacious for the honey, and most convenient for the bee to creep into, yet did she not make choice of that, because then there must have been triangular spaces left void. Now, there are only three rectilineous and ordinate figures, which can serve to this purpose, and inordinate, or unlike ones, must have been, not only less elegant and beautiful, but unequal. [Ordinate figures are such as have all their sides and all their angles equal.] The three ordinate figures are triangles, squares, and hexagons; for the space about any point may be filled up either by six equilateral triangles, or four squares, or three hexagons; whereas three pentagons are too little, and three heptagons too much. Of these three, the bee makes use of the hexagon, both because it is more capacious than either of the others provided they be of equal compass, and so equal matter spent in the construction of each. And, secondly, because it is most commodious for the bee to creep into. And, lastly, because in the other figures more angles and sides must have met together at the same point, and so the work could not have been so firm and strong. Moreover, the combs being double, the cells on each side the partition are so ordered that the angles on one side insist upon the centres of the bottoms of the cells on the other side, and not angle upon or against angle; which also must needs contribute to the strength and firmness of the work.”