Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/172

168 intuitions and the general propriety of their observations, passing over with uncensorious leniency the startling inaccuracy of certain of their conclusions.

Maeterlinck, in that remarkable life of the bee in which he weaves with threads of purest fact such a marvellous woof of poetry, passes poor Virgil's Georgic by in impatient haste as giving merely the legend of the bee. "All that we can glean therefrom, which indeed is exceedingly little," he says summarily, as he passes on to other fields. Without doubt, his conclusion is just. Virgil sang in an age whose ignorance was vast, whose myths were many, and to one who searches for knowledge from the vantage ground of to-day his poem is barren soil. But to the student of human attainment, of man's gradual triumph in wringing from the natural world the basic truths of science, the result is otherwise.

We are, perhaps, too prone to forget that all knowledge comes to us as a long-accumulated heritage in which we enjoy a life interest, in return for which, should we so desire, we may strive to add some trifle to the principal sum. The world grows in the grace of knowledge, albeit slowly; it moves at a glacier's pace, leaving stranded far behind in the trail of its moraine even those who have been great in their day. As Renan says,

Descartes would be delighted if he could read some trivial work on natural philosophy and cosmography written in the present day. The fourth form schoolboy of our age is acquainted with truths to know which Archimedes would have laid down his life.

This is true in apiculture, as in any other branch of natural science. As Langstroth, "the father of American apiculture," declares,

Any intelligent cultivator to-day may, with an observation hive and the use of movable frames, in a single season verify for himself the discoveries which have been made only by the accumulated toil of many observers for more than two thousand years.

To him who, laboring under these advantages, looks backward to learn how much about bees the ancients were able to ascertain from the limited means of investigation at their command, Virgil's work is rich in pleasant surprises and astounding revelations. Without microscopes, which enable us to examine perfectly the minutest organ of the bee, they yet knew that the worker bees were females (as the gender of the pronouns and adjectives which refer to them in Virgil's poem shows us conclusively), and that they never bore any young. Without movable frames, which permit the beekeeper of to-day to examine the interior of the hive at will, they nevertheless had a very clear understanding of the different functions of the bees, and of the social life of the swarm. If Virgil were to walk through a well-kept apiary of to-day, examining its regular rows of neatly painted, dovetailed hives which take the