The prosopis is nimble and not unattractive, the French variety being elegantly marked with white over a black background. She leads a miserable life of starvation and solitude. Her body is almost bare; she has not the warm and sumptuous fleece of her happier sisters. She has no baskets in which to gather the pollen, no brushes, no towering plumes. With her tiny claws she must scratch away the powder from the cups of the flowers; and she must swallow this powder in order to bring it home. She has no tools to work with, nothing but her tongue, her mouth and her claws; and her tongue is short, her claws are feeble and her jaws without strength. Unable to form any wax, to bore holes through wood or dig in the earth, she builds clumsy galleries in the soft pith of dry berries; she puts up a few shapeless cells, and stores these with a little food for the young whom she never will see. And then, having done all this as best she can, she goes off and dies in some hidden corner, as lonely now at the end as she has been through all her poor life. As the bees progress from wildness to civilization, we note that their tongue gradually lengthens, thus enabling more nectar to be drawn from the flowers; hairs and tufts grow and develop, and brushes for collecting the pollen; mandibles and claws become firmer and stronger and the bees acquire the intellect that enables them to make improvements in their dwellings. To relate all the different changes would require a whole volume; I will merely dwell on one or two instances of their development. We have seen the unhappy prosopis living her lonely little life in the midst of this vast and indifferent universe. Some of her more civilized sisters, who have tools of their own and are skilled in the use of them, still exist in absolute solitude. If by chance some creature attach itself to them and share their dwelling, it will be an enemy or, more often, what is known as a parasite. For the world of bees contains many strange phantoms; and there are some species which will have a kind of indolent double, a creature exactly similar to the victim it has chosen to live with, save only that its uninterrupted idleness has caused it to lose one by one its implements of labor. It never works, or tries to work, it collects no food itself, but lives on that which is painfully got together by the unfortunate bee on whom it has fastened. Little by little, by slow degrees and slow stages, the bees advance in civilization and intellect till we find them dwelling together in the regular life of a city. They have abandoned their solitude, their isolation; their existence, formerly so narrow and incomplete, has now become more assured, more concerned with the existence of those round about them. Instead of thinking only of their own offspring, they have learned that they must devote themselves to the race, that they must live and work together in order to make the future sure and safe.