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Abstract of Proceedings. 
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GENERAL MEETINGS. 
Friday, 2nd January. Sir Samuel Wilks, Bt., } 
M.D., F.R.S., President, in the chair. 
Professor F. Y. Edgeworth, M.A., D.C.L., 
read a paper entitled ‘‘ Observations on Bees and 
Wasps,”’ He remarked that the idea underlying the 
paper was to obtain from the observation of insect 
communities more perfect statistics than human society 
presents. When the statistician observes some attri- 
bute of man, ¢.g., the death rate, before he has obtained 
returns enough to determine the average accurately the 
conditions have begun to change-—sanitation perhaps 
has improved, or aggregation into towns has increased. 
Human society will not stand still to be measured. 
It is otherwise with those creatures whose evolution 
is very slow. The average time which a bee or wasp 
takes to gather a load of honey or other food is doubt- © 
less sensibly constant from age to age. The lecturer 
had found great differences in this average time 
according to the nature of the material from which a 
load was procured. Two or three minutes only would 
be required to take in a cargo of liquid honey, but 
half-an-hour or forty minutes might be required in the 
case of certain other kinds of food. If the proportion 
of workers employed on different tasks were constant 
we should expect that, though the several tasks occu- 
pied very different times, the average time spent by a 
