A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY 157 
faculty of speech, hitherto held up as man’s insignia 
of lordship over the rest of creation, may be 
indeed a crude, archaic thing, compared with the 
mind-language of the honey-bees. 
There is another conceivable function which the 
antennz of bees may perform—that of unerring 
and instant estimation of short distances. They 
may be delicate measuring instruments, not 
mechanically applied in the way of a foot-rule or 
metric scale, but registering dimensions inherently, 
as our ears record intensity of sound. This would 
go far to explain how honeycomb is built, how 
the cells are made all of the same shape and size, 
although hundreds of the mason-bees are at 
work on the structure, not only at the same 
moment, but in succession, each bee coming and 
going in the murmurous gloom of the hive, and 
beginning instantly and unhesitatingly at the point 
where her predecessor broke off. As the central 
division of the comb grew, expanding in all direc- 
tions downward, and the cells were built out 
horizontally at the same time, the bee would know 
by her sense of dimension when the limit of each 
side in the hexagonal cell-base was reached, and 
would know the proper angle to turn off at in the 
laying of the next foundation-line. 
Anyone who has watched the flight of the bee 
must have been struck by its sheer facility and 
freedom no less than by its speed. It is quite 
evident that the bee is not only an accomplished 
