70 



DISCOVERY 



CH. 



accuracy, and his values differ very slightly from 

 those accepted at the present day. but it was not 

 until eighteen hundred years later that Newton dis- 

 covered the law of gravitation by which the movements 

 of these and other bodies in the solar system are 

 governed. 



An accurate observation remains unaltered throughout 

 the ages. Its scientific value is determined by its truth 

 to Nature ; and the more complete the testimony, the 

 less room is there for elaboration by investigators in 

 succeeding generations. Whatever precise knowledge 

 exists of natural things and operations has been obtained 

 by patient labour. It is so much easier to accept 

 traditional views upon the structure, habits and functions 

 of the various forms of life around us than it is to inquire 

 minutely into them by personal observation that mis- 

 taken ideas often pass currency for hundreds of years 

 before they are detected. Aristotle in his natural 

 history makes a king-bee the governor of a hive, and 

 this view is reflected in Shakespeare's lines : 



For so work the honey-bees, 

 Creatures that by a rule in nature teach 

 The act of order to a peopled kingdom, 

 They have a king and officers of sorts ; 



King Henry V. I. ii. 



It was a country parson, Charles Butler, who, in the 

 early years of the seventeenth century, took the trouble 

 to study bees themselves instead of reading books about 

 them ; and he found that the queen-bee was the dominant 

 factor in the hive community. Milton possibly knew 

 of Butler's work when he wrote in Paradise Lost, 

 published half a century later, of ' The female bee, 

 that feeds her husband drone Deliciously, and builds 

 her waxen cells With honey stored." 



