1879. ] Zoölogy. 261 
a certain quantity of the seminal fluid contained in the seminal 
receptacle. Nevertheless the organization of the generative 
apparatus of the bee does not differ essentially from that of the 
majority of female insects, to which no one has ever thought of 
ascribing the power of acting at pleasure upon phenomena which 
seem to be absolutely removed from the influence of the will. - 
The hypothesis was set up mainly to explain the fact, which 
has hitherto not been disputed, that an Italian female fecundated 
by a German male furnishes hybrid females (workers and queens) 
and pure Italian males. The opposite would be the case if a 
German queen were fecundated by an Italian male; so that a 
male egg would never receive the seminal SEET a drone would 
never have a father. 
ow I possess at this moment a hive, the queen of which, the 
daughter of an Italian of pure race, has been fecundated by a 
French male. The workers in fact, are partly true Italians, others 
French, whilst others present a mixture in various proportions of 
the characters of the two races. 
Being surprised to see in this hive certain drones amongst 
others as dark as French males, when according to the theory all 
ought to have been Italians, like their mother, I thought it neces- 
sary to examine these males more closely. I therefore collected 
three hundred of them and examined them most carefully, 
obtaining the following statistics : 151 were pure Italians, 66 were 
hybrids in different rs a and 83 were French. From this it 
is evident that the drone eggs, like those of the females, receive 
the contact of the semen deposited by the male in the female 
organs; and the theory of Dzierzon, proposed to explain an 
insulficiently-ascertained fact, becomes useless if this fact is dis- 
rove 
It is “easy: to understand how an insufficient observation may 
have led to the belief that the drones, the sons of an Italian 
mother fecundated by a male of a different race, were all Italians. 
Of 300 males only 83 appeared to me to be strictly French, while 
151 + 66 or 217, ie., the great majority, being yellower than the 
French drones, might easily pass for pure Italians. Thus, in such 
cases, if a great number of males in a hybrid hive have not been 
carefully examined one b one, it is easy to understand how it 
might be believed that they all belonged to the same race as their 
mother, especially when the latter belongs to the handsomer and ~ 
yellower race.—Comptes Rendus, Sept. 9, 1878, p. 408. 
MERRILL’S ORNITHOLOGY OF SOUTHERN Texas.—These notes 
_ comprise a list of birds observed in the vicinity of Fort Brown, 
Texas, from Feb., 1876, to June, 1878. The brochure is extract 
from the Proceedings of the United States National Museum, and 
is valuable for the many field notes regarding the broeiing habits 
of a number of the birds mentioned, with annotations by Dr. 
Tae and Mr. Ridgway. Three plates of outlines add to the 
