858 ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 
M. Pouchet, whom I have already cited several times, has been good 
enough to furnish me with a very interesting anecdote of the mason-bees :— 
“Tn Egypt and Nubia, which I traversed some few months ago, these 
hymenoptera and their buildings are so abundant that the ceilings of certain 
temples and those of some hypogea are entirely covered with them, and they 
absolutely mask the sculptures and hieroglyphics. These nests frequently 
form there a succession of layers; and in certain localities they are super- 
imposed one upon another in sufficient numbers to form a kind of stalactite 
suspended to the vaulted roofs of the monuments. In their construction the 
bee makes use of Nile mud only; and when she has deposited therein her 
progeny, she seals them up with a delicately wrought cover, which the young 
bee, after having undergone its various metamorphoses, lifts off and flies away. 
But these nests are often broken up by a species of lizard, which, by means of 
its singularly sharp nails, climbs to the ceilings. There it wages incessant war 
against the mason-bees while they are building their nests, or rather it may be 
seen crashing through the walls to devour their young progeny.” 
NOTE 17.—Conclusion, p. 337. 
A Feminine Intuition. A great question of method which the future will 
clear up, is, to know how far woman will one day master the sciences of life, 
and to what extent the study of these sciences will he shared between the two 
sexes. If sympathy for animals, long and patient tenderness, the persevering 
observation of the delicatest objects, were the only qualities which this study 
demanded, it would seem as if woman ought to make the best naturalist. But 
the life-sciences have another and a far gloomier aspect, which repels and 
affrights ; and it is so, because they are at the same time the sciences of death. 
However, in this very century, the grand and leading discovery, all-impor- 
tant for the knowledge of the higher insects, belongs to a maiden, the daughter 
of a scientific naturalist of French Switzerland, Mademoiselle Jurine. She has 
found that the bee-workers, who were thought to be newters (of neither the 
one nor the other sex), were really females, attenuated by their exceedingly 
