METHOD OF DETERMINING GENERA. 
171 
of the troplii severally, we should be better able to de¬ 
termine the legitimacy of applying them to the purpose 
of indicating the natural generic character, but being 
compelled, by reason of our ignorance of their several 
special functions, to avail ourselves of their form, relative 
proportions, and number only, uncertainty of having 
caught the clue of nature’s scheme must of necessity 
attend this distribution. 
But as what we do know of their uses in this family 
clearly indicates them to be an essential instrument 
indispensable to the economy of the insect, and which 
gives these organs an almost paramount importance, 
their comparative construction in the several genera 
would yield clear notions of the true order of succession, 
were we acquainted with the relative significancy of the 
various portions of the entire organ. Thus we see it 
numerically most complete in what we are pleased to 
suppose the least genuine bees—the Andrenidee. 
In my series of the genera proposed in the preceding 
section, with the Nudiped true bee Melecta commences 
a deficiency of either some of the joints of the maxil¬ 
lary palpi, or of the paraglossae;—throughout the artisan 
bees this abridgment is conspicuous both in number 
and proportion; and it culminates in what we consider 
the facile princeps, that most wonderfully organized 
of all insects—the genus Apis, which in its neuters has 
neither paraglossm nor maxillary palpi, the latter being 
equally deficient in the male or drone, and in the queen; 
and in both the male and the queen the paraglossm are 
but rudimentary. 
Nature appears too mysterious in her operations to 
permit us to solve these remarkable anomalies, for no 
combination of the genera founded exclusively upon them 
