May 11, 1871] 
NATURE 
23 

are we to understand by the name fly? It is clear that 
the popular sense has no sense at all, or too many senses, 
and yet the word cannot be spared from our vocabulary. 
In any Latin dictionary we shall find Musca (fly), and the 
entomologist pounces upon it and says it shall mean the 
tribe of two-winged insects. Linnzus so used it, and his 
genus Musca, now broken up into many new genera, re- 
presented the greater number of those insects which the 
entomologist now claims as flies.” 

| impression that the wings of insects are normally two, 
and that the four are formed by the “division” of these 
two, an impression which we feel sure a person so well 
informed as the author could not have meant to convey. 
| It also seems carrying hypothetical life-history a little too 
| far to say of a bee emerging from the pupa that “into 
| his mind rushed a full sense of his responsibilities,” and 
on finding himself, say, a worker, “he, or rather she, be- 



In some parts of the work there is rather a tendency to 
jump at conclusions, and to give explanations of very 
doubtful value. It is attempted, for instance, to explain 
why the bee has four wings instead of two, by the fact 
that it is necessary for them to fold up and pack into a 
small compass to avoid injury and be out of the way 
during work, and this it is said is “the purpose of the 
division of the wing.” This conveys the entirely erroneous 
TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE DRAGON-FLY 
came aware that the duties of house-builder, housekeeper, 
nurse, and even soldier and sentinel, devolved upon her ;” 
and accordingly she forthwith “ addressed herself to the 
task of repaying to futurity that debt which the cares of a 
former generation had laid upon her, and daily she toiled 
in its fulfilment.” To make this exposition of the mental 
state of the newly-born bee complete, we should have been 
told whether it regulated its conduct in doubtful cases 
