The Young Queens 
seems unconscious to us, but necessarily wise, 
seeing that the life she organises and main- 
tains is forever proving her to be right? 
Can feebleness at times overcome that 
supreme reason which we are apt to invoke 
when we have attained the limits of our 
own? And if that be so, by whom shall 
this feebleness be set right? 
But let us return to the special form of 
her resistless intervention that we find in 
parthenogenesis. And we shall do well to 
remember that, remote as the world may 
seem in which these problems confront us, 
they do indeed yet concern ourselves very 
nearly. Who would dare to affirm that 
no interventions take place in the sphere 
of man—interventions that may be more 
hidden, but are not the less fraught with 
danger? And in the case before us, which 
is right in the end: the insect, or nature? 
What would happen if the bees, more docile, 
perhaps, or endowed with a higher intelli- 
gence, were too clearly to understand the 
desires of nature, and to follow them to the 
extreme: to multiply males to infinity, 
seeing that nature is imperiously calling for 
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