46 
beginning of my essay (comp. p. 5) I have called routine, (which 
may be intellectual or sentimental), and to which, under certain 
circumstances, the best intellects are apt to succumb. Single 
individuals may have noticed, at times, the difference between 
oxen-born bees, and real honey-bees, but such insolated instances 
of perspicacity do not seem ever to have taken the shape of a 
generalization, like that which Aristotle had formulated centuries 
before, in defining the difference between four- and two winged 
insects. 
Whether experiments to ,make bees“ were continued through 
the middle-ages is not apparent, at least I have not found any 
positive testimony about it; it seems more probable that the 
superstition was propagated among scientific men on the autho- 
rity of the ancients, and by tradition among the rest of the 
people; it may even have originated spontaneously in different 
places at the aspect of bee-like flies, swarming round carcases. 
The final extinction of this superstition was due to two 
different causes (comp. p. 4): 
1. Scientific men (principally Harvey and Redi) adopted 
the theory: omne vivum ex ovo, which put an end to the belief 
in spontaneous generation. This progress however did not 
prevent some very learned contemporaries (like Bochart and 
de Mey) from upholding the old belief, on the authority of the 
ancients. 
2. Improvements in the sanitary police, in civilized coun- 
tries, brought about an early removal of carcases, and thus 
prevented the crowd from witnessing the spectacle of bee-like 
flies swarming about them. But in distant countries, where there 
is no police, the superstition may still be flourishing. 
The recognition of H. tenar, as being different from a bee, 
came about gradually, in the second half of the seventeenth ° 
century, through the efforts of Clutius, Goedart, Blankaart and 
Swammerdam (comp. p. 10—13) but the final identification of 
this fly with the oxen-born bee, was due to Réaumur in the 
next century (comp. p. 14). This identification however was en- 
tirely overlooked in all literature, until I happened to hit upon 
