And, passing by for the present the extremely difficult and debateable question, by what kind of entertaining and simple bibles Agnes shall be first encouraged in the pursuits of literature, I wish to describe to-day more particularly the kind of book I want to be able to give her about her bees, when she is old enough to take real charge of them. For I don’t in the least want a book to tell her how many species of bees there are; nor what grounds there may be for suspecting that one species is another species; nor why Mr. B—— is convinced that what Mr. A—— considered two species are indeed one species; nor how conclusively Mr. C—— has proved that what Mr. B—— described as a new species is an old species. Neither do I want a book to tell her what a bee’s inside is like, nor whether it has its brains in the small of its back, or nowhere in particular, like a modern political economist; nor whether the morphological nature of the sternal portion of the thorax should induce us, strictly, to call it the prosternum, or may ultimately be found to present no serious inducement of that nature. But I want a book to tell her, for instance, how a bee buzzes; and how, and by what instrumental touch, its angry buzz differs from its pleased or simply busy buzz.[1] Nor have I any objection to the [[62]]child’s learning, for good and all, such a dreadful word as ‘proboscis’ though I don’t, myself, understand why in the case of a big animal, like an elephant, one should be allowed, in short English, to say that it takes a bun with its trunk; and yet be required to state always, with severe accuracy, that a bee gathers honey with its proboscis. Whatever we were allowed to call it, however, our bee-book must assuredly tell Agnes and me, what at present I believe neither of us know,—certainly, I don’t, myself,—how the bee’s feeding instrument differs from its building one, and what either may be like.

I pause, here, to think over and put together the little I do know; and consider how it should be told Agnes. For to my own mind, it occurs in a somewhat grotesque series of imagery, with which I would not, if possible, infect hers. The difference, for instance, in the way of proboscis, between the eminent nose of an elephant, and the not easily traceable nose of a bird: the humorous, and, it seems to me, even slightly mocking and cruel contrivance of the Forming Spirit, that we shall always, unless we very carefully mind what we are about, think that a bird’s beak is its nose:—the, to me, as an epicure, greatly disturbing, question, how much, when I see that [[63]]a bird likes anything, it likes it at the tip of its bill, or somewhere inside. Then I wonder why elephants don’t build houses with their noses, as birds build nests with their faces;—then, I wonder what elephants’ and mares’ nests are like, when they haven’t got stables, or dens in menageries; finally, I think I had better stop thinking and find out a fact or two, if I can, from any books in my possession, about the working tools of the bee.

And I will look first whether there is any available account of these matters in a book which I once all but knew by heart, ‘Bingley’s Animal Biography,’ which, though it taught me little, made me desire to know more, and neither fatigued my mind nor polluted it, whereas most modern books on natural history only cease to be tiresome by becoming loathsome.

Yes,—I thought I had read it, and known it, once. “They” (the worker bees) “are so eager to afford mutual assistance” (bestial, as distinct from human competition, you observe), “and for this, purpose so many of them crowd together, that their individual operations can scarcely be distinctly observed.” (If I re-write this for Agnes, that last sentence shall stand thus: ‘that it is difficult to see what any one is doing.’) “It has, however, been discovered that their two jaws are the only instruments they employ in modelling and polishing the wax. With a little patience we perceive cells just begun, we likewise remark the quickness with which a bee moves its teeth against a small portion of the cell; this portion [[64]]the animal, by repeated strokes on each side, smooths, renders compact, and reduces to a proper thinness.”

Here I pause again,—ever so many questions occurring to me at once,—and of which, if Agnes is a thoughtful child, and not frightened from asking what she wants to know, by teachers who have been afraid they wouldn’t be able to answer, she may, it is probable, put one or two herself. What are a bee’s teeth like? are they white, or black? do they ever ache? can it bite hard with them? has it got anything to bite? Not only do I find no satisfaction in Mr. Bingley as to these matters, but in a grand, close-printed epitome of entomology[2] lately published simultaneously in London, Paris, and New York, and which has made me sick with disgust by its descriptions, at every other leaf I opened, of all that is horrible in insect life, I find, out of five hundred and seventy-nine figures, not one of a bee’s teeth, the chief architectural instruments of the insect world. And I am the more provoked and plagued by this, because, my brains being, as all the rest of me, desultory and ill under control, I get into another fit of thinking what a bee’s lips can be like, and of wondering why whole meadows-full of flowers are called “cows’ lips” and none called “bees’ lips.” And finding presently, in Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, something really interesting about bees’ tongues, and that they don’t suck, but lick up honey, I go on wondering [[65]]how soon we shall have a scientific Shakespeare printed for the use of schools, with Ariel’s song altered into

‘Where the bee licks, there lurk I,’

and “the singing masons building roofs of gold,” explained to be merely automatic arrangements of lively viscera.

Shaking myself at last together again, I refer to a really valuable book—Dr. Latham Ormerod’s ‘History of Wasps’:—of which, if I could cancel all the parts that interest the Doctor himself, and keep only those which interest Agnes and me, and the pictures of wasps at the end,—I would make it a standard book in St. George’s Library, even placing it in some proper subordinate relation to the Fourth Georgic: but as it is, I open in every other page on something about ‘organs,’ a word with which I do not care for Agnes’s associating any ideas, at present, but those of a Savoyard and his monkey.

However, I find here, indeed, a diagram of a wasp’s mouth; but as it only looks like what remains of a spider after being trodden on, and, as I find that this “mandibulate form of mouth” consists of