that the insect
comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic,
more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own.
One would think that it was born of some comet that had
lost its course and died demented in space.

Speaking of the intelligence of bees reminds me of a well-known woodsman
and camp-fire man who recently extolled in print the intelligence of
hornets, saying that they have the ability to differentiate friends from
foes. "They know us and we talk to them and they are made to feel as
welcome as any of our guests." "When a stranger visits the camp, they
attract the attention of one they know _who recognizes their signal by
thought or gesture and leaves immediately, returning only when the
stranger has departed_." (The italics are mine.) He says the same
hornets apparently come to them year after year, greeting them on their
arrival, and, should they be accompanied by strangers, they treat them
with the same deference as "when they visit us after we have been in
camp some time."

Did one ever hear before of such well-bred and well-mannered bees? What
would Maeterlinck say to all that? Its absurdity becomes apparent when
we remember that hornets live but a single season, that none of them
lives over the winter, save the queen, and that she never leaves the
nest in summer after she has got her family of workers around her.

III. ODD OR EVEN

One of our seven wise men once said to me, "Have you observed that in
the inorganic world things go by even numbers, and in the organic world
by odd?" I immediately went down to the edge of a bushy and swampy
meadow below our camp and brought him a four-petaled flower of galium,
and a plant-stalk with four leaves in a whorl. In another locality I
might have brought him dwarf cornel, or the houstonia, or wood-sorrel,
or the evening-primrose. Yet even numbers are certainly more suggestive
of mechanics than of life, while odd numbers seem to go more with the
freedom and irregularity of growing things.

One may make pretty positive assertions about non-living things.
Crystals, so far as I know, are all even-sided, some are six and some
eight-sided; snowflakes are of an infinite variety of pattern, but the
number six rules them. In the world of living things we cannot be so
sure of ourselves. Life introduces something indeterminate and
incommensurable. It makes use of both odd and even, though undoubtedly
odd numbers generally prevail. Leaves that