The Life of the Bee 
surveyed by us from an eminence loftier 
than any we can attain for the contem- 
plation of the destinies of man. We 
see before us, in miniature, the large and 
simple lines that in our own dispropor- 
tionate sphere we never have the occasion to 
disentangle and follow to the end. Spirit 
and matter are there, the race and the 
individual, evolution and permanence; life 
and death, the past and the future; all 
gathered together in a retreat that our hand 
can lift and one look of our eye embrace. 
And may we not reasonably ask ourselves 
whether the mere size of a body, and the 
room that it fills in time and space, can 
modify to the extent we imagine the secret 
idea of nature; the idea that we try to dis- 
cover in the little history of the hive, which 
in a few days already is ancient, no less 
than in the great history of man, of whom 
three generations overlap a long century? 
52 
Let us go on, then, with the story of our 
hive; let us take it up where we left it; 
146 
