The Life of the Bee 
for the contemplation of the destinies 
of man. There we see before us, in 
miniature, the large and simple lines that 
in our own disproportionate sphere we 
never have the occasion to disentangle 
and follow to the end. Spirit and matter 
are there, the race and the individual, evo- 
lution 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 na- 
ture; the idea that we try to discover in 
the little history of the hive, which ina 
few days already is ancient, no less than 
in the great history of man, of whom three 
generations overlap a long century ? 
179 
