394 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 



parallelisms to adduce, the close of this striking paper 

 shows. 



The subject of fore and hind symmetry, thus brought directly 

 under notice, had been broached by Dr. Wyman several years 

 before. He returned to it the year following, in his very im- 

 portant morphological paper, " On Symmetry and Homology 

 in Limbs," read to this society in June, 1867, and published 

 in the Proceedings of that date. It is interesting to observe 

 with what caution and restraint he handled this doctrine of 

 "reversed repetitions," which has since been freely developed 

 by one of his pupils who has a special predilection for specu- 

 lative morphology, Professor Burt Wilder. 



Professor Wyman's " Notes on the Cells of the Bee," in the 

 " Proceedings of the American Academy " for January, 1866, 

 is a characteristic specimen of his way of coming directly 

 down to the facts, and making them tell their own story. I 

 could not recapitulate his results much more briefly than he 

 records them in his paper. I need not recall to you how 

 neatly he made this investigation, and represented some of the 

 results, filling the comb with plaster-of-paris and then cutting 

 it across midway, so that the observations might be made and 

 the cells measured just where they are most nearly perfect ; 

 and then printing impressions of the comb upon the wood- 

 block, he reproduces on the pages of his article the exact 

 outlines of the cells, with all their irregularities and imper- 

 fections. But I cannot refrain from citing a portion of his 

 remarks at the close : — 



" Here, as is so often the case elsewhere in nature, the type- 

 form is an ideal one ; and with this, real forms seldom or 

 never coincide. . . . An assertion, like that of Lord 

 Brougham, that there is in the cell of the bee ' perfect agree- 

 ment ' between theory and observation, in view of the analo- 

 gies of nature, is more likely to be wrong than right ; and his 

 assertion in the case before us is certainly wrong. Much 

 error would have been avoided if those who have discussed 

 the structure of the bee's cell had adopted the plan followed 

 by Mr. Darwin, and studied the habits of the cell-making 

 insects comparatively, beginning with the cells of the humble- 



