FALSITY OF HUBER S STATEMENTS. S7 



and on being wholly extricated, she then thrusts her other 

 extremity into the cell, which Huber, perhaps very justly, 

 considers to be done for the purpose of depositing an egg. 

 After having performed this operation five or six times, 

 her majesty becomes so fatigued that she is obliged to rest, 

 when the guards show her every requisite attention, until her 

 majesty be sufficiently recovered to prosecute her labours. 



We may, perhaps, be accused of throwing an air of 

 ridicule over the foregoing statement, but we consider 

 ourselves fully warranted in so doing ; for when we meet 

 with an individual, who attempts to impose upon us with 

 a series of incredible fictions as the results of ocular 

 experience, and who in his statements sets all reason and 

 common sense at defiance, calling upon us at the same time 

 with a dogmatical voice to subscribe our belief to those 

 statements, disproved and falsified as they are by the 

 commonest tests of experience, we then deem such an 

 individual to be a subject fit only for the lash of ridicule ; 

 and the more severely it is applied, the greater is the 

 service done to the cause of truth. 



Disposed, however, as we may be to treat the statements 

 of Huber with that severity of ridicule which they so 

 richly merit, we feel still more inclined to exhaust our 

 powers of castigation upon the statements of those in- 

 dividuals, who, relying upon the belief which has been so 

 extravagantly awarded to the discoveries of Huber, have 

 attempted to earn for themselves an equal degree of credit 

 by the dissemination of facts, pretending to be the result 

 of ocular experience, but which, we confidently assert, no 

 apiarian ever did, ever could, or ever will see. We allude 

 in particular to the statements promulgated by the editors 

 of the Insect Architecture in the volumes of the Society for 

 the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and in the Naturalists' 

 Library, in the latter of which, Mr. Duncan has in many 

 instances actually out-huber'd Huber in the falsity and 



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