[373] Origin of Species, ch. VIII (6th ed., p. 221). The cells of various bees, humble-bees and social wasps have been described and mathematically investigated by K. Müllenhoff, Pflüger’s Archiv XXXII, p. 589, 1883; but his many interesting results are too complex to epitomise. For figures of various nests and combs see (e.g.) von Büttel-Reepen, Biol. Centralbl. XXXIII, pp. 4, 89, 129, 183, 1903.
[374] Darwin had a somewhat similar idea, though he allowed more play to the bee’s instinct or conscious intention. Thus, when he noticed certain half-completed cell-walls to be concave on one side and convex on the other, but to become perfectly flat when restored for a short time to the hive, he says: “It was absolutely impossible, from the extreme thinness of the little plate, that they could have effected this by gnawing away the convex side; and I suspect that the bees in such cases stand on opposite sides and push and bend the ductile and warm wax (which as I have tried is easily done) into its proper intermediate plane, and thus flatten it.”
[375] Since writing the above, I see that Müllenhoff gives the same explanation, and declares that the waxen wall is actually a Flüssigkeitshäutchen, or liquid film.
[376] Bonnet criticised Buffon’s explanation, on the ground that his description was incomplete; for Buffon took no account of the Maraldi pyramids.
[377] Buffon, Histoire Naturelle, IV, p. 99. Among many other papers on the Bee’s cell, see Barclay, Mem. Wernerian Soc. II, p. 259 (1812), 1818; Sharpe, Phil. Mag. IV, 1828, pp. 19–21; L. Lalanne, Ann. Sci. Nat. (2) Zool. XIII, pp. 358–374, 1840; Haughton, Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist. (3), XI, pp. 415–429, 1863; A. R. Wallace, ibid. XII, p. 303, 1863; Jeffries Wyman. Pr. Amer. Acad. of Arts and Sc. VII, pp. 68–83, 1868; Chauncey Wright, ibid. IV, p. 432, 1860.
[378] Sir W. Thomson, On the Division of Space with Minimum Partitional Area, Phil. Mag. (5), XXIV, pp. 503–514, Dec. 1887; cf. Baltimore Lectures, 1904, p. 615.
[379] Also discovered independently by Sir David Brewster, Trans. R.S.E. XXIV, p. 505, 1867, XXV, p. 115, 1869.
[380] Von Fedorow had already described (in Russian) the same figure, under the name of cubo-octahedron, or hepta-parallelohedron, limited however to the case where all the faces are plane. This figure, together with the cube, the hexagonal prism, the rhombic dodecahedron and the “elongated dodecahedron,” constituted the five plane-faced, parallel-sided figures by which space is capable of being completely filled and symmetrically partitioned; the series so forming the foundation of Von Fedorow’s theory of crystalline structure. The elongated dodecahedron is, essentially, the figure of the bee’s cell.
[381] F. R. Lillie, Embryology of the Unionidae, Journ. of Morphology, X, p. 12, 1895.
[382] E. B. Wilson, The Cell-lineage of Nereis, Journ. of Morphology, VI, p. 452, 1892.