_A Feminine Intuition._--A great question of method which the future will clear up, is, to know how far woman will one day master the sciences of life, and to what extent the study of these sciences will be shared between the two sexes. If sympathy for animals, long and patient tenderness, the persevering observation of the delicatest objects, were the only qualities which this study demanded, it would seem as if woman ought to make the best naturalist. But the life-sciences have another and a far gloomier aspect, which repels and affrights; and it is so, because they are at the same time the sciences of death. However, in this very century, the grand and leading discovery, all-important for the knowledge of the higher insects, belongs to a maiden, the daughter of a scientific naturalist of French Switzerland, Mademoiselle Jurine. She has found that the bee-workers, who were thought to be _neuters_ (of neither the one nor the other sex), were really females, attenuated by their exceedingly narrow cradles and inferior regimen. Now, as these workers form nearly the whole people (except five or six bred as queens, and a few hundred males), it follows that the hive of twenty or thirty thousand bees is female. Thus the predominance of the feminine sex, the general law of insect life, has obtained its supreme confirmation. There are _no neuters_; neither among the bees, nor the ants, nor all the superior tribes of insects. The males are a small exception, a secondary accident. I feel able to assert that, on the whole, _the insect is female_. Mademoiselle Jurine's discovery has also revealed to us the true character of the maternity of adoption, an admirably original characteristic of these insects, and the elevated law of disinterestedness and sacrifice which is the ennoblement of their communities. An undoubtedly inferior, but still distinguished merit to that of accomplishing great discoveries, is that of representing animals to us by pen or pencil in their true forms, their movements, and the general harmony of the things with which they are associated. No art seems to belong more naturally to woman. A woman has commenced it. The illustrious Audubon has won just admiration for his representation of the bird in its complete harmonies, its animal and vegetable medium, on the plants which feed, near the enemy which assails it. But it has been too generally forgotten that the model of his harmonious paintings, which present us with so true a picture of life, was furnished by a woman, Sybille de Mérian. Her handsome volume (_Métamorphose des Insectes de Surinam_, folio, in three languages, ed. 1705), was the first in which this admirable method was invented and skilfully applied.