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The Progress of the Race the help thus offered by a magnificent providence. Yet that is, more or less, what the bees are doing in our modern hives.

I have said that even the policy of the bees is probably subject to change. This point is the obscurest of all, and the most difficult to verify. I shall not dwell on their various methods of treating the queens, or the laws as to swarming that are peculiar to the inhabitants of every hive, and apparently transmitted from generation to generation, etc.; but by the side of these facts which are not suffi- 379