24 BRITISH BEES. 



peculiarities of structure, it will be desirable to take a 

 rapid survey of the external anatomy of the bee, for it 

 will enable me to introduce in due order the requisite 

 technicalities with their local explanations. This course 

 will be found most subservient to preciseness and accu- 

 racy, and when mastered, which will be found to be a 

 very simple affair, it will greatly facilitate exact compre- 

 hension. No circumlocution can convey what a few 

 technicalities, thoroughly understood, will immediately 

 explain, and no special scientific work can be read with 

 any profit until they are acquired. 



Diagrams are introduced to aid the imagination in its 

 conception of what is meant to be conveyed. 



This necessary detail I shall endeavour to make as 

 entertaining as T possibly can, by introducing, with the 

 description of the organ, the uses it serves in the 

 economy of the insect. 1 hope thus to add an interest 

 to it which a merely dry technical and scientific defini- 

 tion would not possess. 



Structure is always expressive of the habits of the 

 bees, and is as sure a line of separation, or means of 

 combination, as instinct could be were it tangible. 

 Hence the conclusion always follows with a certainty 

 that such-and-such a form is identical with such-and- 

 such habits, and that, in the broad and most distinguish- 

 ing features of its economy, the genus is essentially the 

 same in every climate. Climate does not act upon these 

 lower forms of animal life, with the modifying influences 

 it exercises upon the mammalia and man. A Megachile 

 is as essentially a Meffachile in all its characteristics in 

 Arctic America, the Brazils, tropical Africa, Northern 

 China, and Van Diemen's Land, as in these islands, and 

 Apis is, wherever it occurs, as truly an Apis. Therefore 



