The theory of space-partitioning, to which the segmentation of the egg gives us an easy practical introduction, is illustrated in much more complex ways in other fields of natural history. A very beautiful but immensely complicated case is furnished by the “venation” of the wings of insects. Here we have sometimes (as in the dragon-flies), a general reticulum of small, more or less hexagonal “cells”: but in most other cases, in flies, bees, butterflies, etc., we have a moderate number of cells, whose partitions always impinge upon one another three by three, and whose arrangement, therefore, includes of necessity a number of small intermediate partitions, analogous to our polar furrows. I think {386} that a mathematical study of these, including an investigation of the “deformation” of the wing (that is to say, of the changes in shape and changes in the form of its “cells” which it undergoes during the life of the individual, and from one species to another) would be of great interest. In very many cases, the entomologist relies upon this venation, and upon the occurrence of this or that intermediate vein, for his classification, and therefore for his hypothetical phylogeny of particular groups; which latter procedure hardly commends itself to the physicist or the mathematician. [Illustration: Fig. 171. (A) _Asterolampra marylandica_, Ehr.; (B, C) _A. variabilis_, Grev. (After Greville.)] Another case, geometrically akin but biologically very different, is to be found in the little diatoms of the genus Asterolampra, and their immediate congeners[399]. In Asterolampra we have a little disc, in which we see (as it were) radiating spokes of one material, alternating with intervals occupied on the flattened wheel-like disc by another (Fig. 171). The spokes vary in number, but the general appearance is in a high degree suggestive of the Chladni figures produced by the vibration of a circular plate. The spokes broaden out towards the centre, and interlock by visible junctions, which obey the rule of triple intersection, and accordingly exemplify the partition-figures with which we are dealing. But whereas we have found the particular arrangement in which one cell is in contact with all the rest to be unstable, according to Roux’s oil-drop experiments, and to be conspicuous {387} by its absence from our diagrams of segmenting eggs, here in Asterolampra, on the other hand, it occurs frequently, and is indeed the commonest arrangement[400] (Fig. 171, B). In all probability, we are entitled to consider this marked difference natural enough. For we may suppose that in Asterolampra (unlike the case of the segmenting egg) the tendency is to perfect radial symmetry, all the spokes emanating from a point in the centre: such a condition would be eminently unstable, and would break down under the least asymmetry. A very simple, perhaps the simplest case, would be that one single spoke should differ slightly from the rest, and should so tend to be drawn in