his follower, Maclaurin, to
attain. And, doubtless, it may excusably be deemed supernatural that the
insect should adopt off-hand precisely that six-sided figure, and
precisely that inclination of the angles of the same figure's pyramidal
roof or floor, which, only by very refined and recondite investigation,
can be scientifically shown to be those best fitted for the purpose. Mr.
Darwin has, however, adduced strong grounds for supposing the amazing
architectural skill thus displayed to have been acquired, not suddenly,
but by the same slow degrees as those which are so clearly traceable
throughout organic progress in general. At the lower end of a short
apiary series, he observed humble bees using their old cocoons for
honey pots, sometimes adding to them short tubes of wax, and likewise
making separate and very irregular cells entirely of wax. At the higher
end of the series, he saw hive bees making double layers of cells, each
cell an hexagonal prism with the basal ends of its six sides bevelled so
as to fit on to a pyramid formed of three rhombs, and each of the three
rhombs which compose the pyramidal base of a single cell on one side of
the comb entering into the composition of one of the three adjoining
cells on the opposite side. Intermediately, he found the Mexican
_meliponae domesticae_ depositing their honey in cells nearly spherical,
and of nearly equal sizes. 'These cells, although aggregated into a mass
otherwise irregular, are always at such a degree of nearness to each
other that they would have intersected or broken into each other if the
spheres had been completed. But this is never permitted, the bees
building perfectly flat walls of wax between the spheres which thus tend
to intersect. Hence, each cell consists of an outer spherical portion,
and of two, three, or more, perfectly flat surfaces, according as the
cell adjoins two, three, or more cells; and when one cell rests on three
others, as from the spheres being nearly of the same size is very
frequently and necessarily the case, the three flat surfaces are united
into a pyramid rudely resembling the three-sided pyramidal base of the
hive bee's cell, and necessarily enter, like the three rhombs of the
latter, into the construction of three adjoining cells.' Reflecting on
these remarkable gradations, it occurred to Mr. Darwin that if the
melipona were to make its spheres of precisely equal sizes, and to
arrange them symmetrically in double layers, a