should enable material and labour to be saved it would have to be accompanied by the habit of making the cells at special distances from each other. And, in the second place, though some few individuals should present themselves with an innate tendency to choose these special distances, whatever advantage might result therefrom, whatever saving of material or labour, would be shared in equally by the whole community, the particular individuals to whom it was due benefiting by it no more than any of the rest, and not being, in consequence, more likely than they to survive in any struggle for existence, or to leave behind them offspring inheriting their special characteristics. No help, therefore, can be derived from Mr. Darwin's principles towards conjecturing why a small minority of such specially endowed bees should be gradually converted into a majority, and should eventually constitute the whole community, thereupon becoming in fact converted into a new species. Let us, however, liberally waive this and all similar objections, and assume a community of hive bees to have been, in the utterly unaccountable manner indicated by the term spontaneous variation, developed from a meliponish stock. Unfortunately, all our liberality will be found to have been thrown away without perceptibly simplifying the problem to be solved. For, whatever be among meliponae the distribution of the generative capacities, among hive bees, at any rate, all workers are sterile neuters, which never have any offspring to whom to bequeath their cellmaking skill, while the queen bee and drones, which alone can become parents, have no such skill to bequeath. Clearly the formula of 'descent with modification by natural selection,' is, in its literal sense, utterly inapplicable here. In whatever manner the cell-making faculty might have been acquired by the first homogeneous swarm of hive bees, it must inevitably have terminated with the generation with which it commenced, if transmission by direct descent had been necessary for its continuance. The only resource open to Mr. Darwin is to suppose, not merely (what is, indeed, obviously the fact) that queen bee after queen bee, besides generating each in turn a progeny of workers endowed with instincts which their parents did not possess and could not therefore impart, generated also princess bees destined in due season to generate a working progeny similarly endowed with instincts underived from their parents; but to suppose further that all this has happened in the total absence of aim, object, intention, or design. Now that all this should have so happened, although not absolutely inconceivable, nor, therefore, absolutely impossible, is surely too incredible to be believed except in despair of some other hypothesis a trifle less preposterous. It is surely not worth while to set the doctrine of probabilities so completely at naught, for the sake of an explanation which avowedly