HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 253 



The address was conversational in style, opportunity being 

 offered for asking questions, the answering of which afforded a 

 chance for the introduction of much that was instructive and amus- 

 ing which was not down on the programme. 



Near the close of the address when speaking of the wonders in 

 the natural history of bees, which have only been discovered since 

 they have been revealed by the microscope in its most perfected 

 form and in the hand of the most skillful manipulators, the fact 

 was noticed that the only royal prerogative of the queen-bee is that 

 of determing the sex of her offspring, which she does by volunta- 

 rily adding to and or withholding the fertilizing principle from 

 the egg, as each one passes through the oviducts, to the ovipositor, 

 the absence or presence of the fertilizing principle in the egg be- 

 ing revealed only to the skillful manipulator of a modern micro- 

 scope of high power. 



Concerning the potential influence of this germ in determining 

 with unerring certainty the characteristics of the new creature he 

 said. 



"Here then, within this atom whose presence is revealed to us 

 by the microscope, are latent those subtle yet potent forces, which 

 may have been conserved for months, perhaps for years, awaiting 

 the time and the environment when in complete agreement with 

 the law of its development, it should be called upon to determine, 

 even in the minutest variation, the distinctive characteristics of a 

 new creature. The determination of sex is a matter of choice, a 

 royal prerogative. The limitation of sexual development; the de- 

 termination of form, function and instinct — reference being had to 

 all female larvae — is a matter of choice among the workers, the 

 prerogative of intelligence superior to that of the queen. The 

 queen in the ordinary and normal performance of her function, is 

 simply reproducing ancestral features which must appear in the 

 direct line of hereditary transmission. Every unfecundated egg 

 must produce a male larva, and every fecundated egg must produce 

 a female larva. And here, in these direct lines her prerogative of 

 sexual differentiation ends. 



"It is here at this stage a more subtile differentiating influence 

 manifests itself, modifying larval adaption and determining struc- 

 tural features radically different and radically divergent in instinct 

 and function. It is indeed very wonderful that the queen should 

 have the power to voluntarily control the sex of her offspring, but 

 the marvel consists not so much in the excercise of that function, 

 as in the singular and unique adaptation of the delicate organs by 

 which the function is performed. That secondary characteristics 

 should now appear, not inherent in ancestral germs, or contributed 

 by ancestral transmission, appears to me far more strange. That 

 this extra differential influence, operating through intelligence or 

 instinct — and the partition between these two appears to be very 

 thin — and in no sense through ancestral transmission, should be- 

 come persistent, is mavelous beyond satisfactDry explanation. We 

 look to the future for explanation of how the same organic being 

 may be made to assume one of two divergent modifications of 



