t for the special
resource derived by the humble bee from possession of a trunk long
enough to enter the nectaries of certain flowers, which the shorter
trunk of the hive bee is unable to tap. But though there be no
difficulty in assuming the improvements in question to have gradually
taken place, and to have become aggregated in the manner supposed, there
is, to my mind, an insuperable objection to supposing that successive
generations of bees should have successively adopted the improvements
without either having the sense to know what they were doing, or being
prompted by some superior intelligence that did know. I will not be so
superfluous as to exaggerate the difficulty. Passing over the earlier
stages of the process, and confining myself to one or two of the later,
I will content myself with showing how infinitesimally small, when
magnified to the utmost, are the chances in favour of these having been
passed through blindly. I will admit it to be possible that in a society
of purely meliponish habits, there might, in virtue of one or other of
those inscrutable causes classed under the general name of spontaneous
variation, arise some two or three individuals with an innate propensity
to make accurately spherical and equally sized cells; that these
individuals, if either males or fertile females, and not sterile
neuters, might help to generate others with the same propensity, these
again generating others, and so on, until the greater part or the whole
of the community became possessed of the same constructive aptitude. I
will admit further that, in virtue of the same inscrutable causes,
individuals, at first few, but gradually increasing in number, might
similarly be born with the additional tendency to make cells at the
same, and that the most appropriate, distance from all adjoining cells;
and will freely acknowledge that the bees, modifying their previous mode
of construction, as meliponae necessarily would do under these altered
circumstances, would construct a layer of cells similar in all respects
to those on one side of the hive bee's comb, except that their bases
would be flat instead of pyramidal. Further, I admit that the bases
would become pyramidal in case the bees should set about constructing
double instead of single layers of cells on the same principle. Not a
little liberality is required for these admissions. For, in the first
place, the fact of the bees having acquired the habit of making perfect