Consider too Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," that remarkable study of a civilization so unlike our own. It is common to dismiss the bee's geometrical abilities with the futile word _instinct_, but honest students of the work of these astonishing insects have shown that, given a new situation to deal with, they first hold active counsel together concerning it, and then adapt their means to new conditions with all the skill and flexibility that suggest powers of trained reasoning. Here is a race that works for an ideal. The general good of the hive inspires in them as inflexible a severity, as ardent an abandonment of the desires of the individual as did the Roman patriotism of the elder Brutus, or of the young Scaevola. No more remarkable story is to be found in literature than Maeterlinck's description of the nuptial flight of the Queen Bee. Choosing a warm and perfect day in the very prime of the season's glow, distilling as she goes some intoxicating aroma--impalpable to our grosser senses--a perfume of love that drives every drone of the hives in passionate ardour to that deadly encounter, to which only he may obtain who can follow her arrowy course into the blue, where, out of sight of our feeble eyes, that one lethal embrace occurs after which the lover comes hurtling from the skies, dead and eviscerated. To provide this lover, whose potent tenderness shall ensure a myriad generation--this lover with greater wing flight than any of his fellows--with countless facetted eyes, with greater body and stronger limbs, this creature of such passion as to sacrifice his life for one moment of joy--the unflagging life work of not less than five of the sexless workers must be given, and hundreds of drones are raised each year that among them one may prove strong enough to attain to that dizzy aerial love. Beside the stern, homogeneous, self-sacrificing civilization of the bees that of even the Japanese shows but clumsy, disordered and inadequate.