The Life of the Bee 



for the contemplation of the descinies 

 of man. There we see before us, in 

 miniature, the large and simple lines that 

 in our own disproportionate sphere we 

 never have the occasion to disentangle 

 and follow to the end. Spirit and matter 

 are there, the race and the individual, evo- 

 lution and permanence, life and death, the 

 past and the future ; all gathered together 

 in a retreat that our hand can lift and one 

 look of our eye embrace. And may we 

 not reasonably ask ourselves whether the 

 mere size of a body, and the room that it 

 fills in time and space, can modify to the 

 extent we imagine the secret idea of na- 

 ture ; the idea that we try to discover in 

 the little history of the hive, which in a 

 few days already is ancient, no less than 

 in the great history of man, of whom three 

 generations overlap a long century ? 



179 



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