SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE. 271 



" Whole books have been written on the marvelous fitness of the structure, 

 the instincts, and the habits of the worker of the honeybee for its life of 

 active industry — a life in which the male has no share, and from which the 

 female is cut off by her seclusion in the depths of the hive, and by her devo- 

 tion to her own peculiar duties. While the queen and the drones are well 

 fitted for their own parts in the social organization of the hive, these duties 

 are quite simple, and very different from the duties of the workers; and 

 as these latter do not normally have descendants, and as they never under 

 any circumstances have female descendants, all the workers are the de- 

 scendants of queens and not of workers. 



" Their wonderful and admirable fitness for their own most necessary 

 part in the economy of the hive must, therefore, be inherited from parents 

 who have never been exposed to those conditions to which the workers are 

 adapted ; and this adaptation can not be due to the inheritance of the effect 

 of these conditions, nor can we believe that they are inherited from some 

 remote time, when the workers were perfect females or when the queens 

 were also workers; for the sterile workers of allied species differ among 

 themselves, thus proving that they have undergone modification since they 

 became sterile. 



" Here we have a most complicated and perfect adjustment of mar- 

 velous efficacy to external conditions which are of such a character as to 

 prove that the inheritance of the effect of these conditions has had no part 

 in the production of the adaptation." 



His views of bird migration, based on the matter of ovulation and not 

 on food supply, are extremely interesting. He says : " As their eggs are 

 very large and heavy, a high birth rate is incompatible with flight, and 

 the preservation of each species imperatively demands that every egg shall 

 be cared for with increasing solicitude; for while in other animals in- 

 creased danger to eggs or young may be met and compensated by an increase 

 in the birth rate, the birth rate of birds can not be much increased with- 

 out a corresponding restriction of the power of flight. Every one knows 

 how quickly birds may be exterminated by the destruction of their eggs or 

 young, and the low birth rate of all birds of powerful flight is a sufficient 

 reason for migration, for at the same time that their fitness for flight limits 

 the birth rate, it permits them to seek nesting places beyond the reach of 

 their enemies." 



His critical estimate of Huxley is tersely presented. He says: "His 

 evolution is not a system of philosophy, but part of the system of science. 

 It deals with history — with the phenomenal world — and not with the ques- 

 tion what may or may not lie behind it. 



" The cultivation of natural science in this historical field and the dis- 

 covery that the present order of living things, including conscioiis, think- 

 ing, ethical man, has followed after an older and simpler state of Nature, 

 is not ' philosophy ' but science. It involves no more belief in the teach- 

 ings of any system of philosophy than does the knowledge that we are the 

 children of our parents and the parents of our children; but it is what 

 Huxley means by ' evolution.' " 



Dr. Brooks credits Galton with employing simple terms to express new 

 and abstruse truths, and we trust those who are continually wrestling with 

 the dead languages to pick out new and distracting words to express their 

 conceptions will profit by Galton's method. 



The lecture on ISTatural Selection and the antiquity of life is replete 

 with original and pregnant suggestions based upon the results of his own 



