The Life of the Bee 
gether without any order; and, at the 
point between the spheres where these 
might have intersected and induced a 
profitable economy of space and material, 
the melipone clumsily insert a section of 
cells with flat walls. Indeed, to compare 
one of their nests with the mathematical 
cities of our own honey-flies, is like 
imagining a hamlet composed of primitive 
huts side by side with a modern town; 
whose ruthless regularity is the logical, 
though perhaps somewhat charmless, re- 
sult of the genius of man, that to-day, 
more fiercely than ever before, seeks to 
conquer space, matter, and time. 
[57] 
There is a theory, originally pro- 
pounded by Buffon and now revived, 
which assumes that the bees have not the 
least intention of constructing hexagons 
with a pyramidal base, but that their 
196 
