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The Life of the Bee gether without any order; and, at the point between the spheres where these might have intersected and induced a profitable economy of space and material, the meliponæ clumsily insert a section of cells with flat walls. Indeed, to compare one of their nests with the mathematical cities of our own honey-flies, is like imagining a hamlet composed of primitive huts side by side with a modern town; whose ruthless regularity is the logical, though perhaps somewhat charmless, result of the genius of man, that to-day, more fiercely than ever before, seeks to conquer space, matter, and time.

There is a theory, originally propounded by Buffon and now revived, which assumes that the bees have not the least intention of constructing hexagons with a pyramidal base, but that their 196