Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/505

Rh Huber retained his faculties to the last. He wrote to one of his friends on the 20th of December, 1832, and two days later he sank to rest, without a pang, in the arms of his daughter, Madame de Molin, in the eighty-second year of his age.

The work, in his own department, which he has left behind him, is marvelous in its accuracy and its fullness. Facts which had eluded observers from the days of Aristomachus of Soli down to those of Bonnet, yielded to the patience, tact, and ingenuity of Huber. It is hard to decide which is most admirable in him—his life-long devotion to one purpose; the patience and caution with which he questioned and cross-questioned Nature by experiment; or the lucidity and picturesqueness of his descriptions of his work. The latter quality, it is probable, was the direct result of his deprivation. It was necessary for him, out of the disjointed answers and remarks of his observers, to form a perfect, rounded mental conception of the facts in themselves and in their relations. This perfect comprehension in great measure insures a luminous style; obscurity of style being much more frequently a result of confusion of ideas than of a mere awkwardness in the use of words.

Huber's work was first recorded in the form of a series of letters addressed to M. Bonnet, and called "Nouvelles Observations sur les Abeilles," 1792. Afterward, in the later editions, several papers on the "Origin of Wax," the "Sphinx Atropos," "Bee Architecture," and other topics, were incorporated into the same volume. Many of his experiments and observations were made at the suggestion of Bonnet, and it was upon his recommendation that Huber constructed his "single-leaf" and "book"-observing hives. The first of these was made to contain a single comb, but, fearing that the bees, who are taught by Nature to build several parallel combs, might manifest change of habit or modification of instinct under new conditions, he also caused to be made another hive, by which he could correct the observations made upon the first. This second hive was so arranged that each frame could be turned back, like a door, upon hinges.

The first observations which Huber records are those upon the fertilization of the queen. Many theories had been advanced upon this subject, by Swammerdam, Debraw, Hattorf, and others, supported by experiments which, to most minds, would have seemed conclusive; but Huber was not satisfied till he again and again repeated, with every precaution and under every condition, the experiments made by his predecessors. These experiments, made by himself and others, he describes with his usual clearness, and from them he deduces the following singular facts, which have been a thousand times confirmed:

The queen-bee, which is the only perfect female in the hive, is fecundated on the wing, and this one fecundation suffices to fertilize the hundreds of thousands of worker-eggs which she lays during: her life, of from three to five years. If the impregnation of the queen be