20 A SHARP LOOKOUT. 



it off with the fine brush on certain of her feet, and 

 by some jugglery or other catches it in her pollen bas- 

 ket. One needs to look long and intently to see 

 through the trick. Pliny says they fill their baskets 

 with their fore feet, and that they fill their fore feet 

 with their trunks, but it is a much more subtle op- 

 eration than this. I have seen the bees come to a 

 meal barrel in early spring, and to a pile of hard- 

 wood sawdust before there was yet anything in nature 

 for them to work upon, and having dusted their coats 

 with the finer particles of the meal or the sawdust, 

 hover on the wing above the mass till the little leger- 

 demain feat is performed. Nature fills her baskets 

 by the same sleight-of-hand, and the observer must 

 be on the alert who would possess her secret. If the 

 ancients had looked a little closer and sharper, would 

 they ever have believed in spontaneous generation in 

 the superficial way in which they did ; that maggots, 

 for instance, were generated spontaneously in putrid 

 flesh ? Could they not see the spawn of the blow- 

 flies ? Or if Virgil had been a real observer of the 

 bees, would he ever have credited, as he certainly ap- 

 pears to do, the fable of bees originating from the 

 carcass of a steer ? Or that on windy days they car- 

 ried little stones for ballast, or that two hostile swarms 

 fought each other in the air ? Indeed, the ignorance, 

 or the false science, of the ancient observers with re- 

 gard to the whole subject of bees, is most remarkable ; 

 not false science merely with regard to their more 

 hidden operations, but with regard to that which is 



