open to objection that bee-life in such a contrivance is carried on under too artificial conditions. In a natural bee-nest, the combs are built roughly side by side, and the brood is reared in the centre area of each comb, the surface covered by the breeding-cells diminishing outwards in each direction. Thus the brood-nest takes a globular form, with the honey-stores above and around it; and this natural arrangement is inevitably destroyed in a hive where the combs are superimposed and not collateral. In the face, therefore, of the practical impossibility of learning anything about bees when they were housed in the usual straw-skep, the old bee-masters confined themselves to a repetition of the beliefs of the ancient writers, deftly interwoven with speculations of their own, which, as no one was in a position to refute them, were advanced with all the more daring and assurance. They seem to have been, in the main, agreed on the point that the ordinary generative principle, otherwise universal throughout creation, was miraculously dispensed with in the single case of the honey-bee. Moses Rusden, who was bee-master to King Charles the Second, and who published his “Further Discovery of Bees” so late as the year 1679, believed that the worker-bees gathered from the flowers not only the germs of life, but the actual corporeal substance, of the young bees. He pointed triumphantly to the little globular lumps of many-coloured pollen which bees so industriously fetch into the hives during the breeding-season, and asserted that these were the actual bodily matter from which the young bees developed. He also maintained that every hive was ruled over by a king, but here Rusden was evidently trying to serve two masters. No doubt he was a true “Abhorrer,” and heartily detested anything at variance with the doctrine of the divine right of monarchs. He had faithfully copied from Virgil as to the gathering of this generative substance from the flowers; but he felt that, as the King’s Bee-Master, it was incumbent on him to put in a good word for the restored monarchy if he could. There were still many in the realm who were altogether opposed to the Restoration, and probably more who were waverers between the faiths. And Rusden, doubtless, saw that if he could point to any parallel instance in Nature where the system of monarchy was the divinely ordained state, he would be furnishing his patron with a magnificent argument in favour of his kingship, and one, moreover, which would especially appeal to the ignorant and superstitious masses. No doubt, however, in taking up this position, Rusden was only echoing the belief immemorially established among the beemen of the past.