Mr. J. W. L. Glaislier on the Form of the Cells of Bees. 115 



and the whole contracted. I shall refer to and quote from the 

 original edition of 1839 ; but wherever the French memoir of 

 1858 shows any discrepancy it will be pointed out either in the 

 text or a note. As a resume of moderate length was given in the 

 Comptes Rendus for 1858, it seemed not unlikely that some one 

 might have anticipated the ensuing remarks; but an examina- 

 tion of the Comptes Rendus from 1858 to 1871 showed that only 

 one communication had in this time been made to the Academy 

 on the subject, viz. by the late Mr. Willich (vol. li. p. 633, 1860), 

 who gives a method of constructing a bee-cell which resembles 

 (and is perhaps identical with) that suggested by Leslie Ellis in 

 his Essay. 



I may as well mention at once that Lord Brougham's essay 

 shows that he has read carefully Reaumur and Lhuillier, looked 

 at Maraldi and Maclaurin, and not seen Boscovich; he has, 

 however, written with great confidence, and on him falls the 

 responsibility of perpetuating and stamping with a fresh mark of 

 authority the old fiction that had been exposed three quarters of 

 a century before. His works have been so widely read, and will 

 no doubt continue to be so well known in the future, that he has 

 in all probability given a new and long lease of life to the old 

 and silly fable : his statements appear on the face of them to be 

 the results of such careful study of the original authorities, and 

 they are presented with such assurance, that few readers will 

 imagine that they can be otherwise than correct. The story, as 

 given by him, is in its facts the same as it appears in the extract 

 from Mr. Wood's work at the beginning of this paper* (omitting 

 the paragraph about the logarithms); only he does not state that 

 Maclaurin made any measurements; in fact he expressly points 

 out in a note on p. 244 that J)r. Reid, in his Essays f, is wrong 

 in stating that Maclaurin ascertained the angles " by the most 

 exact mensuration the subject, would admit/' or solved the 

 problem " by a fluxionary calculus." 



In reference to Koenig's blunder of 2', Lord Brougham says 

 (p. 244), " possibly it is in the logarithms that he has, by neg- 

 lecting some decimal places, gone wrong; " and on p. 345, " the 

 error into which Mr. Koenig fell originated most pro- 

 bably in the tables of sines or in the logarithms which he 



* In a note in the French memoir a more detailed allusion is made to 

 Maraldi's measures, and the 110° and 70° are regarded as approximate and 

 the 109° 28' and 70° 32' as exact : this was Reaumur's view. 



t The passage referred to will be found in chap. ii. (Instinct) of Essay 

 III. of Dr. Thomas Reid's ' Essays on the Active Powers of Man' (orig. 

 ed. 1788); but no history of the problem of the bee-cell is there given; in 

 fact the only sentence that has reference to the matter is the one containing 

 the two errors noticed in the text ; and it simply states that the bees have 

 solved the minimum question correctly. 



