Her nurses, that she may enjoy a complete repose at the sacred moment, take the precaution to close up her cell; erecting over it a little dome, velvety, and of a tawny colour. For ten days she is a nymph, enveloped in a veil of exceeding whiteness and great delicacy, through which you can discern a miniature of mouth, eyes, wings, and feet. Twenty-one days suffice for her development. Then she scratches an opening in the little dome, and thrusts through it her head; next, with her fore-feet resting on the rim, she strenuously endeavours to disengage her whole body. It is a great effort; but the honey is close at hand to recruit her energies. At the first cell she falls in with she plunges into it her proboscis, and initiates herself into life. She is still humid, gray, and very weak. So she hastens to get dry in the sun, to harden her soft and rumpled wings. There she is welcomed by her numerous kinswomen, who stroke and lick her amorously, and bestow on her a maternal kiss. No creature is more richly endowed with implements, or more obviously intended for an industrial speciality. Each organ reads her its lesson, and informs her what she has to do. Lighted by five eyes and guided by a couple of antennæ, she carries in front, projecting beyond her mouth, an unique and marvellous instrument of taste,--the proboscis, or long external tongue,--which is of peculiar delicacy, and partly hairy that it may the more readily absorb and imbibe. Protected, when at rest, by a beautiful scaly sheath, the proboscis puts forth its fine point to touch a liquid; and this point wetted, draws it back into its mouth, where lies the internal tongue, a subtle judge of sensation, and the final authority. To this delicate apparatus add some coarser attributes which indicate their own uses: hairs on every side to catch up the dust of the flowers, brushes on the thighs to sweep together the scattered harvest, and panniers to compress it into pellets of many colours. All these conjoined form the insignia of her trade.--Go, my daughter, and become a reaper! Thou wilt desire nothing else, and thou wilt be fit for nothing else. The fairy virgins who prepared thy cradle, and feed thee daily, will bring thee up to be what they have been. Sober, laborious, and sterile, they practise a rigid economy; in them and in thee they maintain the pure flame of virginity by fasting, or at least by very scanty nourishment, while they banquet splendidly the future mother, though still a child, and are lavish towards the numerous, and, for the most part, useless tribe of males.