The Bee's Knees

JULY, 1925

BY CHARLES D. STEWART

I

A BEE in the field is engaged in gathering three sorts of raw material — flour, varnish, and sirup; all of them commodities which present problems in handling and transportation.

That the yellow pollen of the flowers is simply flour to a bee may be gathered from the fact that beekeepers, in seasons when pollen is scarce, set out little troughs of rye Hour which serves the bees instead and induces them to raise young earlier in the season than they otherwise would. Young bees, like young children, cannot thrive and develop on sweets alone; and so the pollen, a highly nitrogenous product, is the food of the young bee during the days when it is truly a baby in the cradle, occupying the open cell in larval form. Honey, a form of sugar, supplies the bee, as it does the human worker, with a vast amount of heat and energy; but it lacks the elements needed in repair and growth. The older bees eat the pollen in small quantity also, a certain proportion of it being necessary to health.

As for varnish, the bee gets hers from the same source that man does — the resinous exudation of trees. But the bee finds the readiest supply on sticky buds such as those of the balm of Gilead tree, and, in lesser quantity, on the buds of poplar, horse-chestnut, willow, and hollyhock. While we are accustomed to think of the bee as a hoarder of honey, entirely possessed with her passion for sweets, the fact is that every worker bee has varnish on her mind. She will gather it as eagerly and hurry home with it in as high a state of happiness as if she were working in nectar or in pollen. A swarm of bees that has found suitable quarters in the decayed hollowof a tree will clean it out scrupulously, removing every particle of loose dirt and rubbish, and may then repair its surface until they have given it a complete coat of varnish. Those that are kept in the usual ‘patent’ hives stop up every crack and crevice with their resin; and they cement the lid on so tight that the beekeeper has to carry a special tool to pry it off. Mixed with wax it makes the wax stickier and hardens it, and this preparation they use as a basis and buttress with which to fasten their combs securely. If a mouse, or other large unwieldy animal, invades the hive and dies there, a problem In sanitary engineering has to be met and dealt with. Varnish-gatherers set to work at once, and in a short time they have the mouse coated over and made odorless — virtually embalmed in their sweet-smelling resins. Usually bees deal with any objectionable object by dragging it out of the door and casting it overboard; but there are cases when such measures are not practicable.

Some years ago, on a bright warm day in spring, I set to work to varnish a sponson canoe and get it in shape for another season’s use on the lake on which I live. I had not plied the brush long when I became aware that a number of bees were keeping me company. Then more and more bees. After a while they became so numerous, and were flying about in such a highly excited state of mind, that I put down the brush and began to worry. At that time I knew a great deal about bees, or thought I did; and so I was perfectly aware that bees gather the resinous propolis at great expenditure of time and labor. But up to the time when I met the bees in a common concern over the same sort of work, I did not really know what I had learned. This ‘propolis ‘ was a word which kept itself in a different department of my mind from that in which I deal with my everyday work; and so I did not know, as these particular bees did, that it was the same sort of stuff that I was putting on my canoe. But then — who would ever suspect that a bee could know so much about Greek! This little episode taught me a lesson in writing; I decided that if I ever wrote anything about bees I would use the plain word ‘varnish.’

A bee carries her varnish in her pollen basket, so called because she also packs her flour in it. She gathers it when it is in such a warm sticky condition that it will draw out in a thread; and when she has loaded up with all the sticky stuff she can handle she hurries home and applies it to the hive while it is yet in a workable state. Commercial beekeepers, when they have worked a while with their hives, taking off lids and handling frames, find their hands covered with a gummy tenacious substance which soap and water has little effect upon. Following the advice of their Langstroth, or other work on practical beekeeping, they use ‘turpentine or alcohol’ to get it off. A bee’s varnish resembles man’s in the embarrassing qualities of stickiness and insolubility; and so, if a bee can get it off her bristly body without using any special recipe out of a bee book, I think it is evident that she knows how to handle varnish. I am quite willing to believe that she could make use of canoe varnish, even though it is guaranteed to set dust free in a few hours and to be glass hard in a day or two.

The nectar from the blossoms is the bee’s true food. While much of it finds its way into her stomach to supply her present needs, much more is retained in her honey bag, or crop, to be carried home in the form of sap and evaporated to honey in the cells. A bee that is engaged in field work never eats honey so long as the nectar is to be had. She simply stores it up for future use, and for the support of the bees that work in the hive. As a certain part of the swarm, the younger bees, stay at home and devote themselves to household specialties,—wax-making, combbuilding, nursing, and ventilating, — they have to be supported on honey by the workers in the field. This current consumption alone is enough to keep them busy, especially when there is comb being built; besides which there must be a good supply of honey sealed up for time of need.

In hot weather a number of bees in every hive are acting in the capacity of electric fans, their wings working away at a great rate while they drive the air in just the directions needed in a well-calculated ventilating system. In front of any hive, holding their proper stations at the narrow entrance, a detachment of these ventilating bees may be seen. Their heads are always turned toward the entrance so that the air is kept moving past them toward the rear, the reason for this position being that these bees are drawing out the foul air from the hive. On the inside of the hive, their heads turned also toward the entrance, is another file of bees propelling the air past them toward the interior. These bees are sucking in fresh air to take the place of the foul air. It is a double ventilating system based upon good mechanical principles.

To get the full effect of ventilation, it is not enough to admit a steady supply of fresh air at such an opening; it is also desirable to keep the whole mass of air in motion. Building engineers who specialize on such problems as arc presented by theatres, moving-picture houses, and other human hives, have recently announced as an interesting discovery that there is a vivifying influence imparted to air simply by keeping it in motion; and this in addition to, or independent of, any new supply of oxygen. Whether there is any truth in these conclusions or not, bees fulfill all the requirements necessary to take advantage of them; for inside the hive are other detachments of bees steadily agitating the air. A bee has two pairs of wings, the rear pair and the forward pair being placed so close together that their edges almost touch. The wings are hooked together in flying, and to this end there is a row of little hooks on the forward edge of the rear wing and a stiff pleat on the edge of the front wing in which the little hooks may readily engage. A single pair of broad wings would be quite as serviceable in flying, but such a pair would not go into a cell, tor this purpose they unhook and fold together like a fan. It has been observed that, in ventilating, bees do not have the wings hooked together.

The effect of this well-directed activity is not only to give a supply of lifesustaining oxygen to the multitude of workers in the hive, but also to keep down the temperature when there is danger of the comb melting; and, in addition, to evaporate the surplus water from the honey stored in the cells, which are never sealed shut till the product is properly ‘ripened.’ The nectar in some seasons is more watery than at other periods; but whatever its condition in this regard the bees bring it in and store it in the open cells and then fan it to the right consistency. The watery product is held in the uncapped cells largely by capillary attraction; but the bees have a tendency to build the cells with a dip toward the rear. When they are building cells especially for the storage of honey this dip is more pronounced, as if they considered it an advantage; but they also use brood cells which have hatched their young and been cleaned out, and here the tendency is not so pronounced. The practice of building the caps from the bottom up, after the manner of a dam, also helps them in filling the cells full without leakage. Their care in evaporating the honey till it is a highly concentrated food-product is an economic one, due to the high cost of wax. It takes from seven to fifteen pounds of honey to make one pound of wax; and this means that, in addition to all the time and energy spent in gathering the honey, there is the time spent in digesting it into wax. They cannot afford to use such an expensive product for the storage of water.

As this work of driving air in and out of the door is very exhausting, other bees take the places of any that have grown tired, and so the ventilating crew gradually changes. The hotter the day or the more liquid the nectar the more fanning there is in the hive. If the entrance is stopped up, by way of experiment, the whole populace will set their wings agoing. It is apparent that, the ventilating bees are not specialists, except as they specialize for a while on this part of the work. They are volunteers, taking their places among the Hies at the entrance or manning the forces of the interior as circumstances require. And what influence is it, or what supreme authority, that picks this bee and that one for the task, sets some to fanning the interior, sends others to complete the files of the fresh-air crew or the foul-air gang, and keeps up the balanced quota at the door? I am afraid we shall have to call this a mystery.

Indeed, we have now been led to the point where all study of bees, in any of their various activities, must inevitably lead us. At first we are shrewd observers, duly careful and skeptical in our conclusions, but led on by fact after fact until, just as we are about to reach the point of knowledge, we must admit that we are baffled. Unless we throw our scientific caut ion to the winds and turn poet or romancer, there is little to do but wonder. And I do not know but this latter outcome marks a man’s deepest knowledge of nature. Especially as the wonder must beget a certain reverence, and a due humility of mind in the presence of the unknowable.

II

A bee needs so many tools in the day’s work — such a variety of combs, brushes, pincers, shears, and what not — that her body is fairly covered with handy appliances. Any skilled workman, however little he might know about nature, would quickly conclude from an examination of the working parts of a bee that here was a fellow factory-hand who knew the tricks of some highly technical trade. Every hair and joint from head to foot has some special development which makes it an ingenious combination-tool without interfering with the proper working of the bee’s own person.

The leg of the bee — and I am not here forgetting that there are six of them — has a greater number of joints than has the leg of a human being. Midway between the knee and the joints of the foot there is another articulation, or knee, that is particularly interesting. In each of the three pairs oflcgs this knee is differently developed so as to furnish the bee with three sorts of very useful tools — pincers, crowbar, and comb.

On the first, or front, pair of legs, there is just below this joint a selfthreading needle arrangement so equipped as to make a combination comb and scraper for keeping the antenna clean and in condition. It consists of a deep notch, constituting somewhat more than half a circle, in the horny shell of the leg; and the open part, of this notch is closed, or bridged over, by means of a strong little piece of horny substance opening and closing by means of a hinge. The principle of this contrivance is, as I have said, that of a self-threading needle — though it is more finely and mechanically made than most of man’s contrivances. Its object is to allow the bee’s antenna to be slipped into the notch when the little bridgelike piece is raised; and then to be held in place, like a thread in the eye of a needle, as the little piece is dropped down and pressed into position. The interior of this notch is furnished with a comb, the fine long rounded teeth of which are set close together in a single row all round the half circle. The little horny piece which closes the opening does not carry any teeth, but has a sharpened edge. When the bee’s feeler, or antenna, is slipped into the opening and drawn through, the little horny piece presses it down against the teeth.

As a bee’s feelers carry its ‘smell hollows’ and the fine, peculiarly designed hairs which serve somehow as a means of communication between bees, it is important that they be kept free from sticky substances and the accumulation of summer’s dust. With these comb-and-scraper devices placed so conveniently on the front legs — one for each antenna to right and left — the bee can slip her feelers into these self-threading inventions alternately and so keep her means of communication in working order with a minimum of time and trouble.

Looking now at the middle pair of legs, and turning our attention to this same joint upon either one of them, we find a very different sort of arrangement. Sprouting out from beneath the hard shell of the leg, at the edge just above the joint, is a process or prong which I can best describe as being a diminutive elephant’s tusk. It has the same curve, proportions, and general appearance of utility. This is the bee’s combination pick and crowbar; and she uses it particularly for loosening the close-packed pollen in her pollen basket — which she carries upon her hind pair of legs — and pushing it out into the cell in which it is to be stored.

Anyone who has had even a little experience in gardening knows how a packed soil may be loosened with a single tine of a potato fork; or how the worker in the most stubborn soils easily conquers with the point of a pick. For a better illustration, watch the grocer as he separates a pound of dates from the close-packed mass, and observe that it may be pried loose only with a single-pointed instrument which acts as pick and crowbar. Nature had like knowledge of adapting the means to the end, of fitting the tool to the trade, when she equipped the bee with this prong for loosening her load of pollen. Burroughs says that when a bee has brought a load of pollen to the hive ‘he advances to the cell in which it is to be deposited and kicks it off as one might his overalls or rubber boots, making one foot help the other.’ It is not done in quite so loose and easy a raanneras this description would imply. The tusklike tool is working to pry the pollen loose, the one on the left leg serving to unload the right, and the right doing a like service for the left. ‘He,’ as Mr. Burroughs here uses it, must be a grammatical he. No male bee ever gathered any pollen or honey or did any work around a hive. The drone is strictly a gentleman of leisure.

This brings us to the hind legs of the bee, the longest, strongest, and most elaborate of the three pairs; and here we confine our attention to the pair of knees which correspond to the ones we have been studying on the other two pairs of legs. The hind legs of the bee differ from the others in the fact that they become much wider and spatulate toward their lower extremities, somewhat like a sailor’s trousers when well pressed. Rather they are like oars with broad generous blades. Of the three principal divisions of the leg, the upper one is round like the haft of an oar, and the next two sections are flattened so that each is like a blade or paddle. The joint or knee we are now considering unites these two broad, paddlelike sections of the leg. These are hinged together only at one edge, the result being that when this particular knee is bent it opens a wide gaping mouth with sharp, serrated edges. This is the bee’s combination shears and pincers. With these she seizes and disattaches the flattened wax which extrudes from between the joints of the body, on the abdomen, and furnishes her with building material.

In considering the supplies which the bee in the field is engaged in gathering, no mention was made of wax, because it is a product of the hive. It is manufactured like fat in the bee’s body, out of honey which is eaten in large quantities for the purpose. On each side of the abdomen are four little wax-pockets situated in the joints of the hardsurfaced body; and here the supply of wax may be seen issuing, the flat, lightcolored wax appearing somewhat like a letter which a man has tucked up under his waistcoat.

When there is comb to be built, certain bees will hang themselves up in festoons from the roof of the hive and remain there quiescently while wax forms and pushes its way out from the pockets. It takes about twenty-four hours for a stomachful of honey to be converted into wax, the bee having gorged herself with honey for the purpose. And it is the younger bees, which seem to have the most vigorous digestion and wax-forming ability, that, take this specialty upon themselves. The festoons consist of loops like a watch chain, each bee hanging by the claws or hooks on her forelegs to the extended hind legs of the bee above her; and the whole loop is supported by the bees that have hold of the ceiling. At first they form chains hanging straight down; and then two chains uniting at the bottom form a loop.

When the appointed time has been fulfilled and the bee feels that her wax is ready for delivery, she separates herself from the others and proceeds to a part of the roof where building is to begin; and now she detaches the wax from her abdomen, macerates it, — for which purpose she seems to moisten it with some form of fluid or saliva, — and sticks it against the ceiling. Bee after bee comes here and does likewise until a little wall of wax has been built up — a crude blank wall on which the architects have not gone to work. From this it will be seen that the shears and pincers on the hind legs serve a bee to disattach the wax from her own body — not from the body of another bee. Sometimes the floor of the hive will be littered with these wax scales, in which case the worker bees pick them up and carry them to the work, regarding them as so much useful lumber. As the hive is warmed by the bodies of so many busy workers, the wax is rendered pliable and soft, so that it is easily united to the edge of a growing cell and worked into shape by the strong, blunt mandibles of the bee.

The wax shears, as we have seen, are a development of the joint itself; and now, for further interesting developments, we must turn our attention to the broad, paddlelike sections of the leg above and below this particular joint. They are made thus broad in order that there may be room on them for all the devices needed in the reaping and loading of pollen. On the upper one is the pollen basket. It is situated, like a pocket, on the side of the leg away from the bee’s body. On the lower one is the pollen-reaping or gathering device; and this is on the side toicard the bee’s body. The pollen basket is most frequently referred to as being on the bee’s ‘thigh,’ or on her ‘hip,’ but this is far from correct. It is on the tibia, which is t he section below the thigh; and the pollen-gathering device is on the section next below that. It is important that these devices be low down on the leg, at a considerable distance from the bee’s body, in which position they have free scope and reaching power. A bee loads her left pollenbasket with her right leg, and her right one with her left leg; and I dare say anyone will see the difficulty in reaching a hip pocket by means of the opposite shin. Bees that carry their pollen in that position are poetical bees, not the work of a practical mechanic.

The pollen basket, so far as its bottom is concerned, consists of the broad, smooth side of this section called the tibia, its surface being slightly concave. It is fenced round by a row of spines or bristles that serve like the stakes around a wagon bed; and there are longer hairs curving inward and over the top and serving to keep the pollen from falling out. The pollen packs firmly into this place like flour or snow; and being held by the row of stiff spines which fence it in, and the long incurving hairs which clasp it down, there is evident need for the little tusk or crowbar on each of the middle pair of legs. Without this it would be difficult to unload.

On the broad section of the leg next below the one which holds the pollen basket, and, as we have already noted, on the inner side instead of the outer, we find the pollen-gathering and loading device. Arranged across this part of the leg is a series of combs, yellowish brown in color, and looking for all the world like the side combs which women use to hold the hair in place. Each comb has its teeth slightly raised from the surface of the leg, and partially overlapping the next comb below. These combs, by being constantly plied over the bee’s breast, serve to gather the grains of pollen which adhere to the feathered hairs on this part of the bee’s body; and then, when the combs are full, to transfer it to the pollen basket on the opposite leg. The bee bends the knee and wipes or draws the row of combs across the back of the opposite leg just as a man might draw his shinbone lengthwise across the back of his thigh; the little stakes or spines which surround the pollen basket pass between the teeth of the combs and clean them out; and thus the pollen basket, after many such combfuls, is well packed with pollen and the bee is ready to go home and unload. The whole device works together with the ingenuity and perfect fitness of a piece of agricultural machinery.

The feathered hairs on parts of the body are an indispensable part of the machine. These are hairs which have other little hairs growing all over them, giving them a feathered or mosslike appearance. They serve to entangle and hold the grains of pollen better than ordinary smooth hairs would do. On other parts of the bee’s body the hairs are smooth; but these are of different sizes and proportions according to the functions they serve, and are grouped, as we have seen, with various objects in view. On the front pair of legs is an arrangement of hairs which serves the bee as an eye-brush. As bees have no eyelids on their compound eyes, and are always thrusting their heads into the flour bins of the summer’s blossoms, they would seem to have need of some such convenience.

A bee’s sting consists of two separate spears or shafts, each with nine barbs. It will be more readily comprehended by viewing it as a single spear which has been accurately split down the middle so that the two halves move smoothly up and down on one another, and the shafts are enclosed in a neatfitting sheath which holds them together and guides them when thus working. There is a muscle belonging to the sting which gives the spears a pumping motion in the sheath, first one and then the other; and this muscle is able to keep up the pumping motion to a certain extent even after the sting has become disattached from the bee. The consequence is that when the sting is thrust slightly into the flesh the barbs take hold, and the barbs on one spear hold the sting firmly in place while the other spear is thrust deeper, and so on, alternately. The sting works its way in by its own powder, and thus goes deeper than the bee could thrust it with her light weight and the limited hold of the little claws and gumlike pads on her feet. Attached to the sting also is the poison sac, which feeds the spears with poison by a groove in their working surfaces.

III

Readers who have read anything whatever about bees arc probably familiar with the queen bee and the sexual peculiarities of the swarm. These things belong to the better-known facts in bee life such as are to be found in any treatise on beekeeping; but I shall repeat a few of them here, partly because of their intrinsic interest and partly because they lead on to some further considerations regarding the bee’s tools.

In a swarm of bees, numbering anywhere from ten thousand to a hundred thousand individuals, there is but one female, the ‘queen bee.’ During her whole life she does nothing but lay eggs. She does not even feed herself, but is accompanied by a guard of fifteen or twenty bees who watch over her and attend to her wants; and when she thrusts her tongue out they put honey upon it. A few days after she is hatched she leaves the hive and goes forth on her wedding flight; and when she comes back she can lay fertile eggs during all the rest of her life — as many as a million eggs — with but the one impregnation. Except for this wedding flight and the flight she takes when she goes out with the swarm to a new home, a queen bee has no experience in the outer world. While the other bees go forth for work, for exercise, and for cleansing flights, she sees nothing of the world of daylight. She lays eggs; and she goes out of that little door for no purpose whatsoever. And as she builds no comb, lays up no honey, takes no part in the rearing of the young, and does nothing but go from cell to cell laying eggs, she has no opportunity for experience or development in the work of the hive.

The workers, usually called neuter bees, are really females that are sexually undeveloped. They do all the work, of whatever sort, including the ‘nursing,’ which consists in feeding the larvae in their cells and tending to all the needs of the young. Dean Inge, dealing with social questions in a recent number of the Atlantic, referred to the bee community as a ‘socialistic gynsecocracy of maiden aunts.’ It is a phrase which deserves to be perpetuated.

The males, or drones, of which there are only a few hundred in the hive, are nonworkers. They do not bother to support themselves, but depend upon the others to keep plenty of stores in the hive. But they do go outdoors and enjoy themselves generally. They loaf about on the porch like true gentlemen — each a potential husband of the queen. And when the days of plenty are over, and Winter is in sight, the worker bees have a day of slaughter and kill every last drone. They also go over the comb and murder all the baby drones in their cells.

The queen has an appearance quite different from that of a worker. She is longer and slimmer and has wings that are shorter in proportion to her size, though she is a powerful flier. And yet the queen bee is hatched from the same sort of egg as is a worker bee. Usually a queen is hatched in a cell especially designed for the purpose; but if the bees find themselves queenless at a time when there is no royal cell with an egg in it they proceed to raise a queen from one of the eggs in an ordinary worker cell, for which purpose they give the egg more room by tearing away some of the adjoining cells. The larva is then fed exclusively on a predigested food called ‘ royal jelly,’ up to the time when it is sealed in to undergo its metamorphosis into a bee. Ordinarily that larva would have received predigested tood, a sort of mother’s milk, for only a short time, after which its food would become bee bread, or pollen mixed with a little honey. But by this different feeding the egg that was intended to become a worker has its destiny changed and becomes a bee with different tools, different instincts, and a different form. They can make this change even after the larva has been started out in its small cell as a young worker bee, providing the process has not been too long delayed.

This brings us around again to the interesting subject of the bee’s tools. A queen has no pollen basket; she is not intended for that sort of work. And, lacking ihe pollen basket, she is also wanting in that set of combs for gathering and loading the grains; in short, she lacks the whole mechanism for reaping the crop. The drone, not being intended for work, also lacks it.

A queen lacks the eight wax-pockets on the abdomen which a worker has; and the drone, as he does no building, lacks them also. The antenna of a female bee or worker has thirteen joints, while that of a drone has one more. The sting of a queen bee is curved, and with it she kills rival queens. The sting of the worker is straight and serves to defend the hive. The drone, as he is not a sentinel or soldier, has no sting at all; and as he is killed at the end of the honey season, so that he may not consume any of the winter stores, it is a good thing for the others that he has no weapon and cannot fight back. In the wonderful compound eyes of the worker bees there are six thousand facets; but a drone has more than twice as many. And his antenna? have more ‘smell hollows’ than do the antennte of the other bees.

From what we have observed of the sexual arrangements of the hive it will be seen t hat a queen is the daughter of a father and a mother neither of whom has had any experience in the work of the bee, either in the hive or out; and these fathers and mothers were descended from others who never had any experience in those things which make up the marvelous mechanism of the swarm. Consequently they can have no acquired traits or habits, or responses to environment, or effects of the use or disuse of organs to transmit to their offspring. And the neuter bees, who have all the struggles with life, and most of the special fitness which makes the swarm survive, cannot transmit to their offspring any new results of experience, or developments of habit, or gradual conformation to environment — simply because they have no offspring to transmit them to.

Right here is where Darwin’s theory of evolution went on the rocks. To any theory of evolution, heredity — the ability to transmit evolved traits to offspring — is absolutely necessary. A ‘law’ that docs not account for all cases that it is supposed to cover is no law at all; consequently the law of evolution has to succeed here or fail to be a law. Knowing this, Darwin was much perturbed when, about the two hundred and fiftieth page of his Origin of Species, he came to this problem of the neuter insect. As he says, it is a difficulty ‘which at first appeared to me insuperable and actually fatal to the whole theory.’ In fact, he must here submit a t heory which seems plausible, or acceptable as a working hypothesis, or it is the end of his theory of evolution — or, for that matter, any other theory of evolution. And so, while his theory went on the rocks at this point, he set to work manfully to pull it off and get it into some sort of working condition.

He lays aside the idea of animals which vary from generation to generation and which transmit these advantageous changes to their offspring, and supposes instead the ability of a queen, somehow acquired, to lay eggs which vary in this advantageous way. Queens which laid such eggs survived because their swarms had advantages which caused them to survive. As to how such queens came to lay eggs with these peculiar potentialities, and different from the eggs of other queens, he puts the whole stress here on ‘spontaneous’ variation — by which he means variation which we do not understand and cannot account for. Thus the theory went ahead again, but without having been really cleared up even by this supposition. While he had to account for all neuter insects, he was dealing especially with ants; and among ants the neuter insects in a community are not all alike, but have definite classes or castes, quite different from one another in structure and instinct. Here the theory would have to be stretched pretty far — almost too far. For how did a queen ant, simply employed in laying eggs, get this ability to lay eggs in which the whole intricate plan of the community, with its various instincts and different physical structure, was all latent and ready to spring forth from this egg and that? How does ‘evolution’ account for such a thing? Darwin never got quite over the difficulty here, as can be seen in his recapitulation, where he refers to it with an evidently dissatisfied mind.

IV

However, all this is a difficult and recondite subject for the layman to employ himself upon, and he would never know his own opinion of evolution if he had to consider and weigh such obscure and questionable facts. If he wishes to bring his mind to the testingpoint he must get at it more directly.

Here on this front leg of the bee is that self-threading, combined comb and scraper for the bee’s antenna. It is not in the patent-applied-for stage of invention, but is a complete and perfect working device. The whole affair would be quite likely to receive papers from the United States Patent Office; but a lawyer would have to draw up his basic claims pretty carefully to keep some useful point from being stolen. It might be the invention of some assiduous Yankee — though it is doubtful whether he would get it so perfect that it would not need further improvement and repairing.

Considering this now as a mere ‘ fortuitous’ falling-together of raw material, a mere happening or series of coincidences, a result of pure blind chance, the human mind simply refuses to take that position. In anything like this we see preconception. And preconception is mind, intelligent force. It is something quite different from material.

‘Darwin considered natural selection, operating by means of small fortuitous individual variations, as the most important factor in organic evolution.’

So says the New International Dictionary, very correctly including the fortuitous. Indeed, blind chance is of the very essence of the theory; for the survival of the fittest, as the result of advantageous variation, implies that other animals had variations which did not happen to be advantageous. The advantageous variation is one which happens to coincide with some feature of the environment; and so natural selection is a theory which gives an animal a ‘spontaneous’ tendency to vary in all sorts of aimless and undirected ways, and then builds the animal up from some primitive or one-celled form by a long series of coincidences. Essentially it is ‘fortuitous.’

The human mind, accepting this theory, and starting out to give it definite application, is immediately brought to a halt. A man simply will ask quest ions — it is part of his nature; and so he wants to know whether the bee’s antenna existed first and needed a cleaner for long periods of time, or whether the cleaner happened first and was in need of something to clean. As to the gradual evolution of tools, here is a bothersome thought! Some tools are of such a nature that they are not of use till they are complete. A wheelbarrow without a wheel, a pipe wrench without a jaw, would be an entirely unevolved piece of evolution. The idea might be there, but — ! The antenna-cleaner seems to belong to this class of tools. One cannot imagine its progressive stages and see how any one of the imaginary states of incompletion would give its possessor any advantage over other insects in the struggle for existence.

One sees now why evolutionists have more recently taken up the theory of ‘mutations,’ which is that individuals may acquire new characteristics suddenly, all at a birth. This would be a much better way for such tools to happen — all at once, and overnight as it were, answering the need of an antenna that ought to be cleaned. And so it would appear that the antenna and the cleaner must have been made together — in fact, maybe they were made at the same time the bee was made! But this will not do, for this is not evolution at all. Evolution is opposed to special creation; that is its very definition as set down by the evolutionists. We must not imagine any such thing because it is against the law of evolution. So there we are again — the human mind refusing to meet the conditions. For my part I must admit that I am completely frustrated; and so I shall proceed to drop the subject.

Practically, it is like an argument about infinity. Eternity is difficult to admit; a thing without end is beyond the reach of thought. On the other hand it is just as difficult to admit that there could be an end to time or space — beyond which point there would be neither time nor space. Both are impossible.

Evolution, practically, is something in the same line. At first it is a supreme act of faith, under the guise of a ‘working hypothesis’; and very soon it has become a sort of theology, disbelieving which you are a heretic. Right here is the ground of complaint as set forth by Fundamentalists and others. They say that evolution has become a dogma, a creed of science, set forth as if it were truth instead of a mere theory. The ‘working hypothesis,’ which belongs in the laboratory of the trained investigator, has got itself mixed up in our educational programme. It is a school of thought. Young men and women, instead of being brought face to face with the unknowable, and trained in any sort of contemplation or reflection, are wholly neglected in that important department of their natures.

For my part, I cannot contemplate a wasp, a spider, or a bee without being confronted with absolute Mystery. At the end of every telescope, beneath every microscope, at the bottom of every marl pit, is Mystery pure and simple. Science reveals more for me to wonder at, but solves nothing. This may not be religion exactly, but it is a continual reminder of my own position in the universe. And so I think that a system of education which takes the attitude of accounting for all things, or being just upon the point of accounting for them when the scientists have discovered just a few more facts, is not education at all. It stops just short of the truth; and therefore it is not exactly honest.