THE SEEING EYE 325 



portion that even the most highly trained of cabinet 

 entomologists can hardly name them. But in some 

 cases their difference, not of habit in the usual sense, 

 but of manner, is so marked that the open-air man 

 can tell them apart by their flight or by the way 

 they walk on a flower. The late Mr. Saunders had 

 never seen alive a little black bee called Dufourea 

 vulgaris till, on the first of August, 1881, he took 

 a bee at Chobham, of which he says : " The flight and 

 behaviour were so peculiar, as it wriggled itself into a 

 flower, that I knew at once I had caught a rarity, and 

 remarked to my companions that I believed I had 

 got a Dufourea. I also hazarded the remark that 

 it was ten years since it had been taken. When I 

 got home and looked up the former record, it was 

 ten years to a day." Rare as this bee is, there are 

 probably a thousand people who have seen it romp 

 into a dandelion blossom in that unique way, without 

 being aware even that they had seen a bee. There 

 are millions who cannot distinguish between a wasp 

 and a hornet. There appeared one morning to two 

 ladies in the writer's house a mealworm wriggling on 

 the carpet One described it as a goat-moth cater- 

 pillar, of which one had once troubled her by crawling 

 on her leg. The other said it was a " lucky farmer," 

 or larva of the fox-moth, with which she had been 

 quite familiar in the preceding summer. 



Yet the eye sees faithfully the vast differences be- 

 tween the mealworm and the goat-moth caterpillar, 

 and the smaller ones between the chiff-chaff and the 

 willow-wren. To take in and perceive what the lens 

 throws on the retina is not, as the saying is, to train 

 the eye, but to train the understanding. The pith 



