In America, where _Apis mellifica_ is of European introduction, swarms of this bee, escaping domestication, resume their natural condition, and have pressed forward far into the uncleared wild; and widely in advance of the conquering colonist, they have taken their abode in the primitive, unreclaimed forest. Nor do they remain stationary, but on, still on, with every successive year, spreading in every direction; and thus surely indicating to the aboriginal red-man the certain, if even slow, approach of civilization, and the consequent necessity of his own protective retreat:—a strong instance of the distributive processes of nature. It clearly shows how the wild bees may have similarly migrated in all directions from the centre of their origin. That they are now found at the very _ultima Thule_, so far away from their assumed incunabula, and with such apparent existing obstructions to their distributive progress, is a proof, had we no other, that the condition of the earth must have been geographically very different at the period of their beginning, and that vast geological changes have, since then, altered its physical features. Where islands now exist, these must then have formed portions of widely sweeping continents; and seas have been dry land, which have since swept over the same area, insulating irregular portions by the submergence of irregular intervals, and thus have left them in their present condition, with their then existing inhabitants restricted to the circuit they now occupy. That long periods of time must necessarily have elapsed to have effected this by the methods we still see in operation, is no proof that it has not been. Nature, in her large operations, has no regard for the duration of time. Her courses are so sure that they are ever eventually successful; for, as to her, whose permanency is not computable, it matters not what period the process takes; and she is as indifferent to the seconds of time whereby man’s brevity is spanned, as she is to the wastefulness of her own exuberant resources, knowing that neither is lost to the result at which she reaches. Consuming the one, and scattering broadcast the other, but in unnoticeable infinitesimals, she does it irrespective of the origin, the needs, or the duration of man, who can only watch her irrepressible advances by transmitting from generation to generation the record of his observations; marking thus by imaginary stations the course of the incessant stream which carries him upon its surface.