Here I pause again,—ever so many questions occurring to me at once,—and of which, if Agnes is a thoughtful child, and not frightened from asking what she wants to know, by teachers who have been afraid they wouldn’t be able to answer, she may, it is probable, put one or two herself. What are a bee’s teeth like? are they white, or black? do they ever ache? can it bite hard with them? has it got anything to bite? Not only do I find no satisfaction in Mr. Bingley as to these matters, but in a grand, close-printed epitome of entomology [9] lately published simultaneously in London, Paris, and New York, and which has made me sick with disgust by its descriptions, at every other leaf I opened, of all that is horrible in insect life, I find, out of five hundred and seventy-nine figures, not one of a bee’s teeth, the chief architectural instruments of the insect world. And I am the more provoked and plagued by this, because, my brains being, as all the rest of me, desultory and ill under control, I get into another fit of thinking what a bee’s lips can be like, and of wondering why whole meadows-full of flowers are called “cows’ lips” and none called “bees’ lips.” And finding presently, in Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, something really interesting about bees’ tongues, and that they don’t suck, but lick up honey, I go on wondering how soon we shall have a scientific Shakespeare printed for the use of schools, with Ariel’s song altered into ‘Where the bee licks, there lurk I,’ and “the singing masons building roofs of gold,” explained to be merely automatic arrangements of lively viscera. Shaking myself at last together again, I refer to a really valuable book—Dr. Latham Ormerod’s ‘History of Wasps’:—of which, if I could cancel all the parts that interest the Doctor himself, and keep only those which interest Agnes and me, and the pictures of wasps at the end,—I would make it a standard book in St. George’s Library, even placing it in some proper subordinate relation to the Fourth Georgic: but as it is, I open in every other page on something about ‘organs,’ a word with which I do not care for Agnes’s associating any ideas, at present, but those of a Savoyard and his monkey. However, I find here, indeed, a diagram of a wasp’s mouth; but as it only looks like what remains of a spider after being trodden on, and, as I find that this “mandibulate form of mouth” consists of “a, the labium, with the two labial palpi; b, the maxilla, whose basilar portions bear at one end the cardo, at the other the hairy galea and the maxillary palpas; c, the labrum, and d, the mandible,”