134 EXAMINATION OF DUNBAR S SYSTEM. 



tinct and separate characters attached to them, although 

 they have all sprung from the same kind of egg. If this 

 distinction of character had been confined to the peculiar 

 kind of labour performed by each kind of bee, we would 

 have attempted to assist Huber out of his dilemma, by sup- 

 posing that the bee at its birth takes upon itself that peculiar 

 kind of labour to which it feels a natural inclination, on the 

 same principle that a human being is led by his own fancy 

 to become a tailor or a bricklayer. When, however, we are 

 informed that these different kinds of bees are distinct in 

 their make and colour; that one kind has an ovarium, and 

 another has not ; that the bladder of one kind will be dis- 

 tended if filled with honey, but that, let another gorge itself 

 to satiety, no such distension whatever takes place ; that one 

 bee can concoct the royal jelly, whilst another is ignorant of 

 the art; that one bee can make a cell, and another cannot; 

 we are then entitled to draw the inference, that if there be 

 five distinct kinds of bees, there must be five distinct kinds 

 of eggs. The fact being admitted, that the queen lays three 

 kinds of eggs, the metamorphosis or alteration of the innate 

 principle or germ of these eggs becomes the great difficulty 

 which Huber and Dunbar have to surmount. It is, how- 

 ever, not a little singular, that those two naturalists, in their 

 attempts to account for the generation of the common bee, 

 have in reality touched at the two opposite extremes to which 

 it was possible for their fancy to lead them. 



We will, in the first place, examine the statement of Mr. 

 Dunbar, and on his admission that the queen lays only two 

 kinds of eggs, he has wholly remembered to forget to inform 

 us of the precise nature and character of those two kinds of 

 eggs; and thus, with the knowledge that there are three 

 separate and distinct species of insects in the hive, we are 

 left wholly in the dark how to account for the manner in 

 which that particular kind of bee is generated, of which the 

 egg is wanting. Three kinds of eggs will naturally produce 



