INSTINCT IN INSECTS. 153 



horns, and before long you will have a race of oxen in which length 

 of horns will he hereditary, although the animal is sterile." The ex- 

 periment has yet to be made, and is worthy of being a temptation to 

 some one of the great English lords who know so well how to spend 

 their fortunes for the advance of science. There is every reason to 

 believe that it would succeed; and, if this striking instance ever comes, 

 to justify Darwin's theories in their points most difficult of explana- 

 tion, how can we avoid accepting them in their completeness, as well 

 for external forms as for instinct ? 



Neuters in a community bring at their birth an intellectual dispo- 

 sition, a special tendency. The community benefits by it, and pros- 

 pers ; but the parents of these neuters have produced, besides, males and 

 females, who will be able to inherit in their turn the property of giving 

 life to neuters having the same disposition or the same tendency with 

 the first. This becomes hereditary ; it fixes itself in the race ; it is 

 thenceforward an instinct ; and it will be able to continue developing 

 itself thus by a sort of collateral inheritance. The source of it will 

 continue in the parents without its being necessary that they should 

 have it themselves, exactly as the reason for the long horns of the 

 oxen is in the parent bull and heifer which have only short ones them- 

 selves. 



Even after confuting this great objection of the neuters, the prob- 

 lem of explaining the architecture of bees by natural conditions seemed 

 still to defy every attempt. -Yet Darwin undertook to solve it. Aided 

 by the experiments of his countryman Waterhouse, he shows that all 

 this labor, worthy of the most practised geometrician, can be reduced, in 

 the last analysis, to a certain number of very simple habits, taken in 

 succession, so that by a linking together of facts, hypothetical, it is 

 true, yet all perfectly plausible and possible, we arrive at the discovery, 

 in the biological laws already known, of a natural explanation of that 

 instinct which seems to share in the miraculous. We know the subject 

 in question. The cells of the bee are six-sided prisms of perfect regu- 

 larity. The most interesting point is the bottom of the cell ; it is 

 formed of a hollow pyramid of three equal sides, and arranged in such 

 a manner that each contributes its share, on the other side of 

 the comb, to make the bottom of a distinct cell ; the bottom of each 

 cell thus rests on three cells on the other side of the comb. Buffon 

 did not remark this combination ; he only spoke of the regular hex- 

 agonal design of the whole, and on this subject he had a singular idea. 

 "The bees," he said, " all want to make a cylindrical chamber for them- 

 selves in the wax, but room is wanting ; on the comb, which is too 

 small, each one attempts to settle itself in the way most convenient 

 for itself, at the same time that all are equally in each other's way. 

 The cells are hexagonal only on account of reciprocal obstacles. For 

 the same reason," he adds, " as, if we fill a vessel with peas or cylin- 

 drical grains, shut it tightly after pouring in as much water as the 



