74 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



was manufactured in Boston as stated above. On the strength of 

 that, and that alone, he made the deliberate assertion which I 

 have quoted from The Popular Science Monthly. 



Now, after reading and re-reading the context in The Popu- 

 lar Science Monthly article, I find not a shadow of evidence that 

 this statement was meant for a fiction and not for a fact. It is 

 given seriously and deliberately, along with other alleged scientific 

 facts, with no intimation or indication whatever of its spurious 

 character. The readers (and no doubt the publishers) of The 

 Popular Science Monthly accepted the statement in good faith 

 as a fact. The newspapers, of course, accepted it as true from so 

 respectable an authority as The Popular Science Monthly, and 

 even the encyclopaedias finally took it in. Indeed, nobody, it 

 seems, took it as a fictitious " pleasantry," or even dreamed it was 

 meant for one, till the exigencies of the case required such a con- 

 struction (or misconstruction) from the author himself. If it 

 really was meant as a harmless scientific squib, with no malice 

 'prepense, the question arises, How is it that the professor neg- 

 lected to set the matter right when he found that everybody was 

 taking his joke seriously, to the great detriment of an important 

 industry, and the calumnious aspersion of honest honey-pro- 

 ducers ? 



Another example of spurious science is now before me. The 

 Medical Standard for June, 1889, contains a leading article on 

 Embryology, by a learned New York doctor, in which we are 

 gravely informed that " a worker bee is a highly organized creat- 

 ure, with a well-developed brain, wonderful sense-organs, intricate 

 muscular apparatus, and yet it is an offspring of an unimpreg- 

 nated queen bee." Now, this is all well put and quite true, except 

 the last clause, which is just the opposite, of the truth. Any 

 apiarian specialist could have told the doctor that while it is true 

 that the virgin queen bee lays eggs which produce drones or 

 males, she never deposits eggs which produce females — that is, 

 workers and queens — until after she is impregnated by the drone. 

 Hence, the worker bee is not " an offspring of an unimpregnated 

 queen bee." 



"While it would be obviously unfair and unreasonable to hold 

 the Monthly morally responsible for the specimen of wily science 

 and its results to which this article refers,- it is, perhaps, not en- 

 tirely free from blame in allowing the matter to rest uncorrected 

 so long. I take the liberty of here suggesting to publishers of 

 encyclopaedias and scientific works the wisdom of first submitting 

 doubtful points and dubious assertions, made by men outside 

 their special departments, to practical men in such departments, 

 whether the latter be learned or unlearned, for the knowledge of 

 an unlearned man touching his own particular line of business 



