The Foundation of the City 
reason can only lie in the absence of a judge 
superior to ourselves. But it is well that 
argument should make way for fact; and 
indeed, to the objection based on an experi- 
ment, the best reply of all must be a 
counter-experiment. 
In order to satisfy myself that hexagonal 
architecture really was written in the spirit 
of the bee, I cut off and removed one day a 
disc of the size of a five-franc piece from the 
centre of a comb, at a spot where there were 
both brood-cells and cells full of honey. I 
cut into the circumference of this disc, at 
the intersecting point of the pyramidal cells; 
inserted a piece of tin on the base of one of 
these sections, shaped exactly to its dimen- 
sions, and possessed of resistance sufficient to 
prevent the bees from bending or twisting 
it. Then I replaced the slice of comb, duly 
furnished with its slab of tin, on the spot 
whence I had removed it; so that, while 
one side of the comb presented no abnormal 
feature, the damage having been repaired, 
the other displayed a sort of deep cavity, 
covering the space of about thirty cells, 
with the piece of tin as its base. The bees 
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