The Foundation of the City 
muscles that open and close the sperma- 
theca on the vagina; and these muscles 
are certainly very numerous, complex, and 
powerful. For myself, I incline to the 
second of these hypotheses, though I do not 
for a moment pretend to decide which is 
the more correct; for, indeed, the further we 
go and the more closely we study, the more 
plainly is it brought home to us that we 
merely are waifs shipwrecked on the ocean 
of nature; and ever and anon, from a 
sudden wave more transparent than others, 
there leaps forth a fact that in an instant 
confounds all we imagined we _ knew. 
But the reason of my preferring the second 
of these theories is that, for one thing, the 
experiments of a Bordeaux bee-keeper, M. 
Drory, have shown that in cases where all the 
large cells have been removed from the hive, 
the mother will not hesitate, when the moment 
for laying male eggs has come, to deposit 
these in workers’ cells; and that, inversely, 
she will lay workers’ eggs in cells provided for 
males, if she have no others at her disposal. 
And, further, we learn from the interesting 
observations of M. Fabre on the Osmiz, 
183 
