394 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 
parallelisms to adduce, the close of this striking paper 
shows. 
The subject of fore and hind symmetry, thus brought directly 
under notice, had been broached by Dr. Wyman several years 
before. He returned to it the year following, in his very im- 
portant morphological paper, “ On Symmetry and Homology 
in Limbs,” read to this society in June, 1867, and published 
in the Proceedings of that date. It is interesting to observe 
with what caution and restraint he handled this doctrine of 
“yeversed repetitions,” which has since been freely developed 
by one of his pupils who has a special predilection for specu- 
lative morphology, Professor Burt Wilder. 
Professor Wyman’s “ Notes on the Cells of the Bee,” in the 
“‘ Proceedings of the American Academy ” for January, 1866, 
is a characteristic specimen of his way of coming directly 
down to the facts, and making them tell their own story. I 
could not recapitulate his results much more briefly than he 
records them in his paper. I need not recall to you how 
neatly he made this investigation, and represented some of the 
results, filling the comb with plaster-of-paris and then cutting 
it across midway, so that the observations might be made and 
the cells measured just where they are most nearly perfect; 
and then printing impressions of the comb upon the wood- 
block, he reproduces on the pages of his article the exact 
outlines of the cells, with all their irregularities and imper- 
fections. But I cannot refrain from citing a portion of his 
remarks at the close : — 
‘“‘ Here, as is so often the case elsewhere in nature, the type- 
form is an ideal one; and with this, real forms seldom or 
never coincide. . . . An assertion, like that of Lord 
Brougham, that there is in the cell of the bee ‘ perfect agree- 
ment’ between theory and observation, in view of the analo- 
gies of nature, is more likely to be wrong than right; and his 
assertion in the case before us is certainly wrong. Much 
error would have been avoided if those who have discussed 
the structure of the bee’s cell had adopted the plan followed 
by Mr. Darwin, and studied the habits of the cell-making 
insects comparatively, beginning with the cells of the humble- 
