l entomology, first brought discredit on
the doctrine of spontaneous generation: having tried the recipe for the
manufacture of snakes, by his friend the learned Kircher, he could never
witness, he says, "the generation of those blessed snakelets made to
hand." M. Michelet, having a kind word for everybody, has a graceful
apology also for the errors of Virgil, avowing that this was not Horace,
the elegant favorite of Rome, nor the light and indiscreet Ovid, but
Virgil, the child of the soil, the noble and candid figure of the old
Italian peasant, the religious interpreter of Nature; and though he may
have been mistaken as to names, what he said he saw; he was simply
deceived, as subsequently Reaumur was for a moment, by the rat-tailed
larvae or sewer-flies, which, having escaped from their cradle of
corruption, now shining and adorned, are thereupon brevetted to the rank
of noble Virgilian-bees.

Certain superstitions seem to have prevailed in all countries ever since
bees were first domesticated. In England they must not be bought, though
they may be bartered; but there can be no haggling. In this country they
are not even to be bartered. As their homeward flight is supposed to be
westerly, it is necessary to obtain them from a place due east of their
future residence; and their first swarm is to be hived and returned to
the original owner, the bees relying on your good faith and working one
summer on credit, so to say: they are not slaves, to be exchanged for
silver. At this and all subsequent swarmings, it is requisite that they
should be stunned by a confused clatter of bells, pans, pebbles, and
cries, although it was long ago explained by Butler that this noise came
into custom merely in signal of the ownership of a vagrant swarm. When a
death occurs in the household, the hives are to be told of it and
dressed in crape, in Switzerland turned topsy-turvy, as without such
treatment the bees do not consider themselves used as a part of the
family, and will fly away.

Among all the anecdotes given, perhaps the best instance in relation to
the intelligence of the bee is that narrative of its stratagems in
warfare with the famous Death's-Head Moth. Mr. Huish, to be sure,
leaning upon Buffon, laughs at it, believes it on a par with Jack's
Beanstalk, and is grimly satisfied that no bees ever erected
fortifications of any kind other than as against the effluvium of
murdered mouse or snail when they wall up its source in a