“The author of ‘The Microscope’ keeps to the old idea of bees sucking honey and not ‘licking it up,’ for he says, ‘The proboscis, being cylindrical, extracts the juice of the flower in a somewhat similar way to that of the butterfly.’ And of the tongue he says, ‘If a bee is attentively observed as it settles upon a flower, the activity and promptitude with which it uses the apparatus is truly surprising; it lengthens the tongue, applies it to the bottom of the petals, then shortens it, bending and turning it in all directions, for the purpose of exploring the interior and removing the pollen, which it packs in the pockets in its hind legs, (by, he supposes, the two shorter feelers,) and forms the chief food for the working-bees.’ He says that when the waxen walls of the cells are completed, they are strengthened by a varnish collected from the buds of the poplar and other trees, which they smear over the cells by the aid of the wonderful apparatus. That part of the proboscis that looks something like a human head, he says, ‘can be considerably enlarged ... and thus made to contain a larger quantity of the collected juice of the flowers; at the same time it is in this cavity that the nectar is transformed into pure honey by some peculiar chemical process.’” Note on page 145.—My correspondent need not be at a loss for sermons on usury. When the Christian Church was living, there was no lack of such. Here are two specimens of their tenor, furnished me by one of Mr. Sillar’s pamphlets:— EXTRACT FROM THE EXPOSITION UPON THE FIRST EPISTLE TO THE THESSALONIANS, CH. IV. VER. 6. BY BISHOP JEWELL. “Usury is a kind of lending of money, or corn, or oil, or wine, or of any other thing, wherein, upon covenant and bargain, we receive again the whole principal which we delivered, and somewhat more for the use and occupying of the same: as, if I lent one hundred pounds, and for it covenant to receive one hundred and five pounds, or any other sum greater than was the sum which I did lend. This is that that we call usury; such a kind of bargaining as no good man, or godly man, ever used; such a kind of bargaining as all men that ever feared God’s judgment have always abhorred and condemned. It is filthy gains, and a work of darkness: it is a monster in nature; the overthrow of mighty kingdoms; the destruction of flourishing states; the decay of wealthy cities; the plagues of the world, and the misery of the people. It is theft; it is the murdering of our brethren; it is the curse of God, and the curse of the people. This is usury: by these signs and tokens you may know it: for wheresoever it reigneth, all those mischiefs ensue. But how, and how many ways, it may be wrought, I will not declare: it were horrible to hear; and I come now to reprove usury, and not to teach it.