ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY. 85 
in, so as to meet the corresponding member and form 
a long tube, the proboscis as it is called, with which 
the Lepidoptera suck honey from flowers. The 
maxillary palpi do not share in this singular develop- 
ment, they are almost obsolete. But the labial pai, 
which we have learned to regard in the wasp as 
organs of feelmg and perhaps of taste, are trans- 
formed into a sheath for the long delicate proboscis 
which is coiled away between them. 
Only one more instance of the wonderful changes 
and combinations of these variable parts; and this 
from the honey-bee. Here the proboscis is not 
formed, as in the butterfly, from the maxilla, but from 
the ligula or tongue. We have seen this in the wasp 
as a squarish membranous expansion, indented at the 
extremity. In the honey-bee the central part is pro- 
tracted into a long strap or stalk, which is clothed 
with fine hairs, and tipped with a button at the end. 
It is not tubular, as in the butterfly, for the bee does 
not extract the honey by suction, but by repeated 
immersion of the tongue in the fluid. One might 
have thought that for the same simple purpose, 
namely that of collecting honey from flowers, the 
same organ would have been employed in these two 
classes of insects. But the fertility of invention is 
nowhere so lavishly displayed as in insects; and a 
close examination shows the proboscis of the honey- 
bee to differ from that of the butterfly in its ana- 
tomical structure, in its development, and in the mode 
of its application. 
There is as little doubt that wasps smell as that 
- they taste, or see, or hear: many of their movements 
