Notices of New Books. 7231 



formed one of my seven primary groups of Lepidoptera, a guess which 

 I now believe to have been made under the influence of erroneous 

 education, for who is there that does not entertain a belief in the 

 primary importance of some such group ? In " Sphinx Vespiformis " 

 I reduced this group by eliminating all those families which did not 

 possess the Sphingiform larva, and which Guenee has subsequently 

 separated. I am now disposed to abandon it altogether, seeing in the 

 family of Sphingidae, as now restricted, nothing more distinctive or 

 prominent than in the other families into which the Diurues and Bom- 

 byces are by universal consent divided. — E. N. 



* T7ie Honey Bee: its Natural History, Habits, Anatomy and Micro- 

 scopical Beauties.'' By James Samuelson. London ; Van 

 Voorst, Paternoster Row. 1860. 166 pp. letterpress j eight 

 tinted Illustrations. Price 6s. 



In this little work the author has gathered together many of the 

 most amusing facts in the history of the honey bee, and has stated 

 them with perspicuity and in an agreeable manner, but he appears to me 

 to rely too entirely on the assertions of others, without taking sufficient 

 trouble to investigate for himself: thus Mr. Samuelson states at p. 63 

 " that the queen bee is capable of producing and depositing fertile 

 eggs in her virgin state, from which males alone proceed ; in fact, it is 

 now tolerably well established that the eggs wherefrom drones are 

 hatched are in no case fertilized by the male element." This hypo- 

 thesis has been broached by Dzierzon, restated by Siebold, and Siebold 

 has been translated into English by Dallas ; but so far from being 

 tolerably well established it rests on the most vague conjecture. The 

 very mention of such hypotheses must be confusing to the young, and 

 for such only Mr. Samuelson's book is adapted. 



At present, however, the state of bee lore is very unsatisfactory. As 

 the juries for adjudicating prizes at the Great Exhibition of 1851 

 broadly pronounced every alteration made in the bee-hive during the 

 last two hundred years to be a retrograde movement, so we may state 

 that our knowledge of bee economy had been retrogressive also ; and 

 now that more able observers and more profound thinkers have turned 

 their attention to the hive-bee, we find we have to unlearn almost all 

 that we have learned. Bee literature is a perfect quagmire ; there is 

 safe footing nowhere, and Mr. Samuelson's little volume may be cha- 

 racterised as the well-intentioned attempt of a man in a quagmire to 



