liquid is instilled,
a quantity too small to endanger the patient's life. With scattered
nervous centres, each requiring a separate operation, this method is
impracticable: the victim would die of the excess of corrosive fluid. I
am quite ashamed to have to recall these old experiments. Had they been
resumed and carried on by others of greater authority than I, we should
have escaped the objections of chemistry.

When light is so easy to obtain, why go in search of scientific
obscurity? Why talk of acid or alkaline reactions, which prove nothing,
when it is so simple to have recourse to facts, which prove everything?
Before declaring that the hunting insects' poison has preservative
properties merely because of its acid qualities, it would have been well
to enquire if the sting of a Bee, with its acid and its alkali, could
not perchance produce the same effects as that of the paralyser, whose
skill is categorically denied. The chemists never gave this a thought.
Simplicity is not always welcome in our laboratories. It is my duty to
repair that little omission. I propose to enquire if the poison of the
Bee, the chief of the Apidae, is suitable for a surgery that paralyses
without killing.

The enquiry bristles with difficulties, though this is no reason for
abandoning it. First and foremost, I cannot possibly operate with the
Bee just as I catch her. Time after time I make the attempt, without
once succeeding; and patience becomes exhausted. The sting has to
penetrate at a definite point, exactly where the Wasp's sting would
have entered. My intractable captive tosses about angrily and stings at
random, never where I wish. My fingers get hurt even oftener than the
patient. I have only one means of gaining a little control over the
indomitable dart; and that is to cut off the Bee's abdomen with my
scissors, to seize the stump instantly with a fine forceps and to apply
the tip at the spot where the sting is to enter.

Everybody knows that the Bee's abdomen needs no orders from the head
to go on drawing its weapon for a few instants longer and to avenge
the deceased before being itself overcome with death's inertia. This
vindictive persistency serves me to perfection. There is another
circumstance in my favour: the barbed sting remains where it is, which
enables me to ascertain the exact spot pierced. A needle withdrawn
as soon as inserted would leave me doubtful. I can also, when the
transparency of the tissues permits,