Reasoning—it is a big word, a double-edged thing that requires careful handling. We have been so long accustomed to use it only in regard to our own magnificent mental processes that it savours almost of the ridiculous to bring it to bear upon such a tiny et-cetera in the brute creation as the honey-bee. And yet, the deeper we go in the study of the bee and all her works, the more difficult it becomes to find a word that shall more fittingly meet the case. Instinct will not do. Instinct implies a dead perfection of motive, born of omniscience, working through unthinking, unvarying organisms to an equally perfect end. But in neither project nor performance can the honey-bee be said invariably to achieve, or even to aim at, perfection. It will be seen hereafter that her motives, her methods, the results she brings about, all show frequent, undeniable error or deviation. She attempts to carry through a sound enterprise, but abandons it on finding unforeseen difficulties in the way. She will persevere blindly in an obviously foolish piece of business, and fail to see her mistake until both energy and resources are at an end. Sudden emergencies may find her ready with the saving stroke of last ingenuity, or merely plunge her into listless despair. Courage, industry, economy, wise forethought, or still wiser afterthought, are all common traits in her nature. But she may develop idleness, unthrift, slovenliness, or even downright dishonesty, if chance or circumstance indicate the way. And what are all these but the defects or attributes of reason? If bees and men, each admittedly rooted in divinity, be prone to the like failings and inconsequences, who shall discriminate between them, dividing arbitrarily natural cause and effect? Watching bees at work for the first time through the glass panels of an observation hive, or in the almost equally informing modern hive with movable combs, this question continually arises, and there seems only one answer for it. There is something curiously human-like in their movements over the crowded combs, and the old comparison of a beehive to a city of men is never out of mind. There are the incessant hurryings to and fro; chance meetings of friends at odd street-corners; altercations where we can almost hear the surly complaint and tart reply; busy masons and tilers and warehouse-hands at work everywhere: a hundred different enterprises going forward in every thronging thoroughfare or narrow side-lane, from the great main entrance to the remotest drone-haunted corner of the hive.