128 CHANGE IN THE SEXUAL CHARACTER OF THE EGG. 



Rennie. Can it be credited that a professor of natural 

 history in the King's College of London, could have allowed 

 himself to be so led and misled by the authority of one 

 individual, as to support and disseminate the unnatural and 

 irrational doctrine of an insect, in itself possessing no pro- 

 creating nor creating power, being enabled by the adminis- 

 tration of some undefined and inexplicable liquid, designated 

 as royal jelly, to change the sexual character of an egg, 

 and to endow it with properties, faculties, and virtues, which 

 were not bestowed upon it by the parent ? Huber, how- 

 ever, is by no means scrupulous in drawing very largely on 

 the credulity of those, who have been blindly led to espouse 

 his system under the influence of its extreme novelty and 

 originality. He appeared in the community of apiarians as 

 the very Mungo Park of them, and his astonished partizans 

 triumphantly declared that he had penetrated deeper into 

 the hitherto partially explored subjects of his research than 

 any of his predecessors. The names of Reaumur, Swam- 

 merdam, and Schirach were considered as no longer worthy 

 of being quoted on the subject of the natural history of the 

 bee, and Huber uprose as the sovereign authority, from 

 which to dissent was construed into an act of heresy. 



It is a fanciful conceit of certain apiarians with Huber 

 at their head, that the queen bee obtains her particular 

 character, so wholly different from the common bee, not 

 from any distinct virtue inherent in the egg, but from the 

 peculiar make and construction of her cell, by which her 

 ovarium becomes elongated and expanded, and she comes 

 forth a different insect than by her nature was originally 

 intended. By the latter expression we are led to understand 

 that the egg from which the queen originated, was at its 

 deposition in the cell the egg of the common bee, and that 

 it has been changed into that of the q Uee n by the particular 

 make of the cell in which it is laid. Now, it will not surelv 

 be contended that the simple elongation or expansion of the 



