Chap. YII. 
NEUTER INSECTS. 
235 
than at present; for then, as we have seen, the 
spherical surfaces would wholly disappear, and would 
all be replaced by plane surfaces; and the Melipona 
would make a comb as perfect as that of the hive-bee. 
Beyond this stage of perfection in architecture, natural 
selection could not lead; for the comb of the hive- 
bee, as far as we can see, is absolutely perfect in eco¬ 
nomising wax. 
Thus, as I believe, the most wonderful of all known 
instincts, that of the hive-bee, can be explained by 
natural selection having taken advantage of numerous, 
successive, slight modifications of simpler instincts; 
natural selection having by slow degrees, more and 
more perfectly, led the bees to sweep equal spheres 
at a given distance from each other in a double 
layer, and to build up and excavate the wax along 
the planes of intersection. The bees, of course, no 
more knowing that they swept their spheres at one 
particular distance from each other, than they know 
what are the several angles of the hexagonal prisms 
and of the basal rhombic plates. The motive power 
of the process of natural selection having been economy 
of wax; that individual swarm which wasted least 
honey in the secretion of wax, having succeeded best, 
and having transmitted by inheritance its newly acquired 
economical instinct to new swarms, which in their turn 
will have had the best chance of succeeding in the 
struggle for existence. 
No doubt many instincts of very difficult explanation 
could be opposed to the theory of natural selection, 
—cases, in which we cannot see how an instinct could 
possibly have originated; cases, in which no interme¬ 
diate gradations are known to exist; cases of instinct 
of apparently such trifling importance, that they could 
