48 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



that some ants seem to smell with their feet and even in utter blackness so 

 find their way upon a beaten track, whether by smell or touch, that that 

 thought which is memory seems practically to reside in their six wire-like 

 legs. Whereas our sense of balance is located above the Eustachian tubes near 

 the ear, it appears in some insects in a particular joint of the antenna. This 

 sort of topsyturvydom could be developed at length, but it is obvious that 

 the first man who with a clean strong lens and a cool head broke into the 

 hitherto locked world of insect anatomy found himself in an Aladdin's 

 cave of new truths. Of what he saw, Swammerdam made drawings that 

 in three centuries have not, I think, been surpassed. 



Throwing health and honor to the winds, Swammerdam achieved a 

 work that was epochal. Singlehanded he discovered half the secrets of the 

 hive. Where Aristotle had seen a king bee as the ruler of the apian com- 

 munity, Sw ammerdam detected the matriarchy, and proved that the queen 

 is the only effective female of the hive. He unmasked the infinitely effete 

 drones as the true males, and the workers as neuters. He put forth deHcate 

 skill, such as the world had never seen, to reveal the anatomy of the eyes 

 and sting and proboscis — that marvelous tongue that dips in the deepest 

 nectaries of the flowers. Of the bee eye nothing escaped him; he saw the 

 many-faceted eyes which are largest in the drone, and the three other 

 eyes that no one else had ever noticed, simple eyes like ours. He alone knew 

 that the compound eye was not a collection of such cameras as our eyes 

 that have pupil and iris, but that it is rather a window, admitting almost 

 all the light that falls on it. As for the sting, he knew that it is curved in the 

 queen, straight in the worker, and wanting in the drone. He experimented 

 with its venom, thrusting the darts into his arm, swallowing the poison, 

 rolling it on the sensitive tip of his tongue. With such a knowledge of 

 bee anatomy as this, science was now for the first time in a position to 

 generalize upon the economy, politics and behavior of the hive. Greatest 

 of the Dutchman's triumphs was his discovery of the metamorphosis of 

 insects. The egg, the caterpillar, the pupa and the butterfly are all, he 

 proved to an astonished Europe, one and the same individual in different 

 growth stages. 



I am come now to the last of the three great microscopists of the age, 

 Antony van Leeuwenhoek. Wealthy, but self-made, an expert lens grinder 

 who increased magnification up to two hundred and seventy diameters 

 before he realized that more median lenses give the best results, unwilling 

 to part with the secret of his art, shrewd with a sort of magnified common 

 sense, gossipy, stubborn, ignorant of any language but Dutch and con- 

 temptuously proud of it, Leeuwenhoek of Delft was one of the most 

 eccentric personalities of the scientific age, and you may be sure that his 

 English friends in the Royal Society did not miss a wrinkle in his character. 



He had, boylike, discovered the sheer rapture of looking at the whole 



