The Sun.
London, England, 1864-09-19 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

" THE SPECTATOR" WITH A BEE IN ITS BON-
NET !—A man must he very blind, very incapable
of the most ordinary generalisation, who does not
see that bees stand morally and politically to many
flies and other insects much in the relation of man
to apes and other savages. Or, if you please (be-
cause we do not pretend to settle the details of the
analogy, we only stipulate for it in the gross), that
the bee, the wasp, the hornet, the humble bee, may
stand for the various civilised communities of man
on the globe, as compared with sundry flies, which
as the lowest savages and apes, live in motley
groups, very busily and jollily perhaps, but without
appreciable organisation. Let the bees stand for
England, then the big and distant hornet will do
for Russia, and the flighty, graceful, omnipresent,
marauding wasp for France. Germany will be the
busy, buzzing, rustie, yet fierce, little humblesbee,
and so on. Or shall the bedizened wasp stand for the
bedizened banditti of the Apennines or Pyrenees ?
Any how the main analogy is patent—it is not
superficial—it lies in the heart of the matter. Has
man a language ? So have the bees, as we shall
show on good authority. Has man an art and a
science ? So have the bees. Does he transmit his
ideas ? The bees do likewise. To repeat the quo-
tation from Shakspae made by an accurate student
of bees ;

" So work the honey-bees
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The art of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king, and officers of sorts,
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;
Others, like, merchants, venture trade abroad;
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make booties on the summer's velvet buds,
Which pillage they with every march bring home
To the tent royal of their emperor;
Who, busied in his majesties, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold;
The civil citizen kneading up the honey;
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burthens at his narrow gate ;
The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o'er to executors pale
The lazy, yawning drone."
These lines, so magnificently true, we quote almost
with regret, their substantial truth having a ten-
dency to invest them with the air not of absolute
truth but of ingenious parallelism. But let us for
a moment imagine the condition of man and the bees
reversed. Suppose man were the size of the bee and
the bee the size of the man, would the diminished
size of man affect the worth of his intellectual and
moral ideas in themselves ? Even as he is what is
he seen from a balloon? What is he seen from the
moon ? A vast deal less than the bee actually is to
us seen through the glass of our own relative mug.
nitude. Yet is he as thus seen less noble in reason,
less infinite in faculties, less admirable and express
in form and moving, less in action like an angel, in
apprehension less like a god, the beauty of the world,
the paragon of animals ? Surely not. And if some
Hamlet of a bee chose to speak of bees as Hamlet
spoke of man, though we might perhaps smile, we
certainly could not object, seeing that Shak-
spere, who created Hamlet, gives the bees in
the lines we quoted above every right to think as
much of themselves, as man of himself. And all
this is still only relatively. The consequences of
the inversion of size, if looked at positively and
economically, are equally if not more striking. Our
size adds not a jot to the worth of our ideas and
feelings in the scheme of the world. But it adds
just everything to our weight and influence on our
own globe. If the bee had been the size of man
and man the size of the bee, man would certainly
not have been master of the globe. Sir John Hers-
chel indeed in his introduction to the study of
natural philosophy speaks very eloquently of the
defencelessness of man. But the truth is that in
the savage state man is beyond comparison the most
ferocious, adding colder purpose to ferocity, among
animals. Babies are defenceless, of course, but so
are whelps, so are larvae. Supposing the bee to be
the size of man, she would have reigned mistress of
the globe far more supremely than we could ever
pretend to. What can a savage do in beauty and
delicacy at all comparable with the work of the
bee ? What is his best armour to the terrible
dagger which is part of her very frame, what
are his tools compared to the carpenter's mu/.
tum in varvo which she carries about her ?
Endowed with flight too, who can tell
her chances of conflict with the powers
of nature ? What chance would the elephant or
rhinoceros stand against a winged warrior that
could settle at will on his back, stab him behind,
and devour him before ? And if the bee builds as
an insect, in ivory and gold, and lives upon nectar,
what would she have built had she been unquess
tioned mistress of the earth, skipping rivers with
easy flight, surveying countries as from a balloon,
perhaps able to fly with ease across the ocean, cer•
tainly able to tear up the bowels of the earth with
her own naked strength in a manner to-astonish the
most herculean navvy, and taught by dominion,
spurred by growing ambition, end aided by flight—
to supplement her already prodigious strength by
constructions and engineering devices of which we
in our rudeness have no conception ? But it will be
said these suppositions are idle. They are not, and
therefore they cannot be. They are not, certainly
not within our experience. That they cannot be,
that they are not on some other globe, for instance,
is what a man must be a bold man to affirm. What
is it that prevents the bee being bigger here ? It
may be some constituent in the atmosphere so
minute on this globe as to prevent the insects who
depend upon it from growing any larger. Horses
feeding on one soil go to bone, on another to flesh.
May not globes, alike in the main, yet by a minute
inversion in the proportion of the gases, for
instance, change the whole relations between
the order of the animal kingdom, assuming
those orders to be, as they may very well be on
many globes, substantially alike ? Suppose a
globe, for instance, in which that substance or
those conditions, whatever they are (are they
hdiacrhk metallic hues, should be greatly in
give flies, and bees, and other in-
s it inconceivable that on that globe
stkhenceot sw, nthei wr
ascendant,i
the entomological should be and would be the su-
preme Order, trampling on two-legged fearfully
and wonderfully made diminutive creatures, as we
trample on the flies and insects here ? That the bee
is wonderfully made is certain. Her nervous sys-
tem is apparently far more intricate than ours. And
physiologists know the whole consequences of that
one single fact. We have said that it is demons-
treble, let us say all but demonstrable, that bees
have
.a language, and of course a memory. Dr.
Bevan mentions the following anecdote : "A colony
had been attacked in 1804 by the sphinx (moth) and
suffered through too tardy preparations. In 1807
the moth reappeared, when the bees immediately
constructed fresh ramparts. Now, working bees do
not live more than a year at the outside." We need
not follow Mr. Wood, and specify the consequence.
Again, it is clear that they have not instinct merely
but reason. Instinct can only mean the stereotyped
acts under stereotyped circumstances. If the adap-
tation of means, however clumsy, to ever shifting
circumstances can be called instinct, then all we
can say is that man's instinct transcends the in-
stinct of animals only in degree. If not, then ani-
mals and insects, in whatever degree, give demons-
trable proofs of reason. Take the following
instances :—Quoting again from Dr. Bevan, Mr.
Wood says, "A very striking illustration of the read
soning power of bees occurred to my friend Mr.
Walond. Inspecting his bee boxes at the end of
October, 1817, he perceived that a centre comb,
burdened with honey, had separated from
its attachments, and was leaning against an-
other comb, so as to prevent the passage of the
bees between them. This accident excited great
activity in the colony, but its nature could not be
ascertained at the time." "At the end ofd week,"
Mr. Wood continues, "the weather being cold and
the bees clustered together, Mr. Walond observed
through the window of the box that they had con-
structed two horizontal pillars between the combs
alluded to, and had removed so much of the honey
and wax from the top of each as to allow the pas-
sage of a bee ; in about ten days more there was an
uninterrupted thoroughfare, the detached comb at
its upper part had been secured by a strong barrier
and fastened to the window with the spare wax.
r, his being accomplished the bees removed the hori-
zontal pillars first constructed as being of no further
use." Will anybody after reading this deny that
bees have reason and science ? Is science less science
for being implicit, i. e., involved in spontaneous but
reflective and adaptive action, and not explicitly
laid down in books ? If every Englishman were a
Stephenson and every woman a Brunel, and we had
no encyclopaedia of engineering, because we wanted
none, should we not laugh at those who said that
Have we not our own jokes against the' bookish ?"
we, poor things, had only instinct not reason ?
If humanity were perfect there could be no books
Are the bees less perfect because they accomplish
great feats of engineering, regard being had to their
size, which are quite equal to our own under orb.