INTELLECT AND INSTINCT IN BEES. 243 



making wax, building comb, guarding the stores 

 against robbers, or even tending and nurturing the 

 young brood. We see, then, the endowments of 

 instinct in all their higher manifestations are con- 

 ferred alone on the members of the community who 

 cannot transmit them to posterity. Nor does the 

 fact of the occasional appearance of fertile workers at 

 all explain away the difficulty ; for, as has been 

 shown, such abnormal mothers produce only male 

 offspring, which never inherit the special faculties of 

 the undeveloped females, and consequently cannot 

 transmit what they have never possessed. 



If asked what solution of the difficulty we are 

 prepared to offer, we confess, with satisfaction, to the 

 retention of the undisproved theory that the Creator 

 has, in His own inscrutable, but all-beneficent, way, 

 specially gifted these insects with powers of a kind 

 adapted to the highest welfare of their race, as we 

 also believe He has given to other orders of beings, 

 from the ant up to man, and on to angels, faculties to 

 be used, not only for the benefit of the individual, the 

 species, or the genus, but for the harmonious working 

 of the universe He has called into being. To those, 

 at least, who rejoice to believe in a personal God, 

 who find an atheistic cosmos the most unthinkable 

 of notions ; who see a thousand mysteries inex- 

 plicable on any theory of unintelligent "natural 

 selection," the study of the honey-bee provides 

 reason for, and evokes the sentiment of, sublime 

 adoration of an infinite First Cause, i.e. the Deity. 



R 2 



