Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/84

74 was manufactured in Boston as stated above. On the strength of that, and that alone, he made the deliberate assertion which I have quoted from The Popular Science Monthly.

Now, after reading and re-reading the context in The Popular Science Monthly article, I find not a shadow of evidence that this statement was meant for a fiction and not for a fact. It is given seriously and deliberately, along with other alleged scientific facts, with no intimation or indication whatever of its spurious character. The readers (and no doubt the publishers) of The Popular Science Monthly accepted the statement in good faith as a fact. The newspapers, of course, accepted it as true from so respectable an authority as The Popular Science Monthly, and even the encyclopædias finally took it in. Indeed, nobody, it seems, took it as a fictitious "pleasantry," or even dreamed it was meant for one, till the exigencies of the case required such a construction (or misconstruction) from the author himself. If it really was meant as a harmless scientific squib, with no malice prepense, the question arises, How is it that the professor neglected to set the matter right when he found that everybody was taking his joke seriously, to the great detriment of an important industry, and the calumnious aspersion of honest honey-producers?

Another example of spurious science is now before me. The Medical Standard for June, 1889, contains a leading article on Embryology, by a learned New York doctor, in which we are gravely informed that "a worker bee is a highly organized creature, with a well-developed brain, wonderful sense-organs, intricate muscular apparatus, and yet it is an offspring of an unimpregnated queen bee." Now, this is all well put and quite true, except the last clause, which is just the opposite, of the truth. Any apiarian specialist could have told the doctor that while it is true that the virgin queen bee lays eggs which produce drones or males, she never deposits eggs which produce females—that is, workers and queens—until after she is impregnated by the drone. Hence, the worker bee is not "an offspring of an unimpregnated queen bee."

While it would be obviously unfair and unreasonable to hold the Monthly morally responsible for the specimen of wily science and its results to which this article refers,-it is, perhaps, not entirely free from blame in allowing the matter to rest uncorrected so long. I take the liberty of here suggesting to publishers of encyclopædias and scientific works the wisdom of first submitting doubtful points and dubious assertions, made by men outside their special departments, to practical men in such departments, whether the latter be learned or unlearned, for the knowledge of an unlearned man touching his own particular line of business