144 INVESTIGATION OF KIRBY's ANALOGY. 



males, seems certainly a more violent change than for a 

 worker bee, which may be regarded as a sterile female, to 

 assume the secondary character of a fertile one."" 



Weak and inconclusive indeed is the argument, and 

 tottering indeed must be the system, which has such a frail 

 and senseless prop to support it. In the first place, this 

 change from the character of the female to the secondary 

 character of the male, is, in the instances adduced by Kirby, 

 the direct effect of old age, and after the command of " in- 

 crease and multiply " has ceased to operate. The change is 

 not effected by the influence of some exterior agent acting 

 upon the organic structure, and imparted to it in the very 

 earliest stage of its existence, as is the case with the royal 

 jelly acting upon the larva of the common bee ; for it is here 

 necessary to remark, that the change in the character of the 

 bee takes place before the command to " increase and mul- 

 tiply" has begun to operate at all. The main question, how- 

 ever, still remains unsolved : neither the original sex of the 

 man nor the woman, nor of the hen bird is changed ; direct 

 sterility is not changed into the most exuberant fertility. 

 The man obtains not an ovary, nor is the woman divested of 

 hers. The change in their character is the immediate effect 

 of that decrepitude which is the invariable attendant upon 

 old age ; and in perfect consistence with the usual course of 

 nature, the power of breeding is extinguished; but how very 

 differently is it constituted with the working bee. The power 

 of procreating its species was not innate in the germ of the 

 egg, at the time of its deposition by the female bee, but the 

 character of that egg becomes altered by an exterior process 

 perfectly unaccountable, and inexplicable by any of the prin- 

 ciples of analogy ; and the insect comes forth at the proper 

 period of its development, a wholly different creature than it 

 would have been but for the administration of an extra dose 

 of royal jelly. Kirby further says, " that the instinct of the 

 bees teaches them that a certain kind of food, supplied to a 



