562 Correspondence. [September, 
beyond measurement ! The origin of sex is well worthy of re- 
search ; but it is wonderful how few and unmethodised are the 
observations on it. Colenso notes that a majority of eldest 
children are females. I have seen somewhere (probably in one 
of Captain Burton’s books) that in a district of Brazil there are 
four females to one male, and I have read something similar 
of the Philippine Islands : then we have a fey/ fadts or disputes 
about the production of sex in bees, caterpillars, &c., and it is 
said that short eggs produce hens and long eggs produce cocks. 
Poultry keepers are said to have a way of telling the sex of _an 
egg by observing the germinal spot through the shell, and Ear 
Spencer noticed a disproportion of sex among the progeny of 
particular bulls ; but such loose observations are not science. 
Let us have science. 
Why should I not make you my Matrimonial Gazette i 1 
have emerged from the “ mad competition,” but I have been four 
years a widower from want of meeting the right lady, although I 
am vain enough to think that Captain Galton would not objedt to 
put me in his list of eligibles on any ground, mental, moral, or 
bodily. Applications may be sent to you ! They must be from 
friends, not from the ladies themselves. 
Widower. 
August 9, 1884. 
BEES AND FLOWERS. 
I have met with two difficulties in the relations between bees and 
flowers which, perhaps, you or some of your correspondents 
may solve. 
We are told that when a bee sets out from the hive on a honey- 
o-athering excursion it visits merely flowers of the same species 
or at least of the same genus. I should like to know how this 
rule adts with respedts to flowers which are at once rare and at- 
tractive to bees. I have noticed a very fine passion-flower of the 
blue species trained against the wall of a cottage, about a mile 
from the nearest village. In that village, as far as I have been 
able to ascertain, there is not another passion-flower growing. 
Nor are there, I believe, any bee-hives. Yet, the passion-flower 
in question is abundantly visited by bees, which, if they do not 
also visit other flowers of totally different orders, must fly from 
and to a very great distance, solely for the sake of the twenty or 
thirty blossoms generally to be found on this plant. 
There is another difficulty with respedt to the fuchsia. The 
blossoms of this shrub are well known to be remarkably 1 ich in 
honey, and their colours are fairly conspicuous. Yet, as far as I 
