I pause, here, to think over and put together the little I do know; and consider how it should be told Agnes. For to my own mind, it occurs in a somewhat grotesque series of imagery, with which I would not, if possible, infect hers. The difference, for instance, in the way of proboscis, between the eminent nose of an elephant, and the not easily traceable nose of a bird: the humorous, and, it seems to me, even slightly mocking and cruel contrivance of the Forming Spirit, that we shall always, unless we very carefully mind what we are about, think that a bird’s beak is its nose:—the, to me, as an epicure, greatly disturbing, question, how much, when I see that a bird likes anything, it likes it at the tip of its bill, or somewhere inside. Then I wonder why elephants don’t build houses with their noses, as birds build nests with their faces;—then, I wonder what elephants’ and mares’ nests are like, when they haven’t got stables, or dens in menageries; finally, I think I had better stop thinking and find out a fact or two, if I can, from any books in my possession, about the working tools of the bee. And I will look first whether there is any available account of these matters in a book which I once all but knew by heart, ‘Bingley’s Animal Biography,’ which, though it taught me little, made me desire to know more, and neither fatigued my mind nor polluted it, whereas most modern books on natural history only cease to be tiresome by becoming loathsome. Yes,—I thought I had read it, and known it, once. “They” (the worker bees) “are so eager to afford mutual assistance” (bestial, as distinct from human competition, you observe), “and for this, purpose so many of them crowd together, that their individual operations can scarcely be distinctly observed.” (If I re-write this for Agnes, that last sentence shall stand thus: ‘that it is difficult to see what any one is doing.’) “It has, however, been discovered that their two jaws are the only instruments they employ in modelling and polishing the wax. With a little patience we perceive cells just begun, we likewise remark the quickness with which a bee moves its teeth against a small portion of the cell; this portion the animal, by repeated strokes on each side, smooths, renders compact, and reduces to a proper thinness.”