60 OPINION OF THE FRENCH NATURALISTS. 



allowed to remain in the hive for the express purpose of 

 fecundating these eggs j but as Sir John Sinclair very 

 pointedly expressed himself, they were no where to be 

 found, but in the brain of the worthy enthusiast. For the 

 same reason, Huber invented his everlastingly fecundated 

 ovarium, and it must be admitted that the latter invention, 

 as far as originality is concerned, has the advantage over 

 that of the enthusiastic Scot. The falsity of the former is 

 subject to immediate detection— the latter can only be sub- 

 verted by reason and analogy, based on an extensive expe- 

 rience in all the habits of the insect. The everlastingly 

 fecundated ovarium of Huber has been justly denounced by 

 the foreign naturalists, as unworthy of the slightest consi- 

 deration, and they have rightly determined that it ought to 

 be exploded, as a direct chimera, from the natural history of 

 the bee. Nevertheless, amongst the scientific men of France, 

 there are many advocates for the sexual intercourse of the 

 queen and the drone, as they consider it more consistent 

 with the analogies of nature, than the theory of the fructifi- 

 cation of the egg in the cell *. The rapid manner in which 

 the queen lays her eggs, combined with other circumstances, 

 gives almost a decided negative to that hypothesis, it being 

 admitted, as in the case with fowls and all other oviparous 

 animals, that every egg, previously to its deposition, receives 

 the prolific principle of the male. Now, concurrent with the 

 testimony of Huber himself, and we may add with the 

 majority of apiarians, the queen bee hastens from cell to cell, 

 in which she oviposits, without coming in contact with any 



* In the review of the first edition of my Treatise on Bees, in the Monthly 

 Review, the critic says, that my system of the fructification of the egg, after its 

 deposition in the cell, is contrary to the analogies of nature. In the preface to 

 the second edition, those objections were refuted, by adducing the fish and the 

 frog, as instances of the eggs being fructified after their emission from the 

 body of the female. I confess my inability to trace any analogy in the insect 

 tribe, but in that respect, the system of Huber and my own stand exactly upon 

 a par. 



