ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY. 59 
In carrying out the proposed plan, I do not feel 
sure that I have always adopted the right mean 
between the two opposite dangers of saying too 
much or too little ; of tellmg what few might care to 
be told, or no more than what every one who feels 
an interest in the subject already knows. And as to 
how this should be told. Probably, no amount of 
hterary skill in the selection and arrangement of 
materials could render bare anatomical details any- 
thing but dry. So, where the minute examination of 
any part has appeared indispensable, at the risk of 
seeming discursive, I have tried to make the descrip- 
tion clearer and more interesting by introducing such 
illustrations as the corresponding structures of other 
familiar insects afford. The illustration which natu- 
rally suggests itself to contrast or compare with 
the wasp is the honey-bee, both in her habits and her 
anatomical structure. With regard to this insect, I 
must own to having reversed the order of Swam- 
merdam and Réaumur, by both of whom the first 
place of honour and affection is always assigned to 
the honey-bee. But I speak as I find. Wasps never 
attack me if I leave them alone, or handle them with 
discretion; but bees, conscious perhaps, that the 
working hours of an anatomist were not spent among 
flowers, used to repel all my attempts to become 
better acquainted with them. So wasps have been 
my Grammar of Entomology, instead of the more 
popular but more capricious insect. I confess, that 
in the uncertain state of my relations to bees, I only 
feel quite secure in watching them when, to the 
latest improvement in glass hives, there is added a 
room for the observer quite inaccessible to angry 
