r the partitioning of the Snail-shell; it soon
hardened into a solid ceiling. The Bee tried the resinous gum and
benefited by it. Her successors also benefited by it, especially after
improving it. Little by little, the rubble-work of the lid and of the
gravel barricade was invented: an enormous improvement, of which the
race did not fail to take advantage. The defensive fortification was the
finishing-touch to the original structure. Here we have the origin and
development of the instinct of the Resin-bees who make their home in
Snail-shells.'

This glorious genesis of insect ways and means lacks just one little
thing: probability. Life everywhere, even among the humble, has two
phases: its share of good and its share of evil. Avoiding the latter
and seeking the former is the rough balance-sheet of life's actions.
Animals, like ourselves, have their portion of the sweet and the bitter:
they are just as anxious to reduce the second as to increase the first;
for, with them as with us,

De malheurs evites le bonheur se compose.
(Bad luck missed is good luck gained.)

If the Bee has so faithfully handed down her casual invention of a resin
nest built inside a Snail-shell, then there is no denying that she must
have just as faithfully handed down the means of averting the terrible
danger of belated hatchings. A few mothers, escaping at rare intervals
from the catacombs blocked by the Osmiae, must have retained a lively
memory, a powerful impression of their desperate struggle through the
mass of earth; they must have inspired their descendants with a dread
of those vast dwellings where the stranger comes afterwards and builds;
they must have taught them by habit the means of safety, the use of the
medium-sized shell, which the nest fills to the mouth. So far as the
prosperity of the race was concerned, the discontinuance of the system
of empty vestibules was far more important than the invention of the
barricade, which is not altogether indispensable: it would have saved
them from perishing miserably, behind impenetrable walls, and would have
considerably increased the numbers of their posterity.

Thousands and thousands of experiments have been made throughout the
ages with Snail-shells of average dimensions: the thing is certain,
because I find many of them to-day. Well, have these life-saving
experiments, with their immense importance to the race, become general
by hereditary bequest? Not at all: the Resin-