dictionaries of quotations that were published between 1576 and 1600. It is not only a mine of sixteenth-century literary and poetical English, but, at a time when the Futurists are futuristically proclaiming a new Renaissance, it is interesting as an analysis of what subjects poets then found most ready to their mind and art, or at any rate, what Robert Allot, its happy-go-lucky and blundering editor, chose for the instruction and delectation of his readers. Excluding Mr. Anon and Company, fifty-five authors are represented in 'England's 'Parnassus' by 2223 extracts. In 'The Pageant of English Poetry' (1909), edited by Mr. R. M. Leonard, 300 authors contributed 1150 whole poems. A very rough comparison between these two volumes gives arresting results. Let a few instances serve. In the Pageant there are forty references under the heading of Children and Childhood, in Allot's Parnassus only five. Hell has no place in the former, it is six times represented in the latter. For Allot's nine remarks on Spring, Mr. Leonard has one short of thirty. Weather'cocke' Woman has fallen from forty-seven, most of them unflattering 'Take away weaknesse, and take woman too,'— to twenty-one. Music has risen from five to twenty. There seems to be practically no mention of the Sea, Sailors, and kindred subjects in the Parnassus; the Pageant contains forty-two whole poems thus inspired. As for Love-on Love these time-severed anthologists are in concord. They squander it on their pages as Flora squanders daisies on a mead. Mr. Tagore's 'Sadhana' is a reflection and confirmation of the ideals which have been the inspiration of his poetry. It embodies to some extent several of the discourses which Mr. Tagore is in the habit of giving to his students in his school at Bolpur in Bengal, but for present purposes it is a kind of open letter, simple, critical, persuasive, addressed by the East to the West. It compares two antithetical views of human experience, two distinctive attitudes towards self, towards Nature, and towards the one Eternal Spirit.' Against the pride of our Western civilisation, exultantly enthroned amid its bricks and mortar, seeking by conquest to subdue the world, to heap up riches, Mr. Tagore sets the contemplative serenity, the self-suppression, the calm acceptance of pain, the lifelong effort to win to an inward peace, unity, and wisdom practised by the wise men of the East. His hope, too, is to free from the mouldy trappings of erudition the mummied specimens we possess of Indian thought and religion. Things of the spirit are flowers of perpetual growth and changeless beauty. Truth fails no man. It is always a pure joy, a path to the eternal. Fact is nothing but a blind alley, leading only to itself. But though Mr. Tagore urges the necessity of a patient and isolated contemplativeness, of the one arduous quest, Know thine own Soul' a piece of counsel often so glibly enunciated by the Poloniuses of life in the same breath with Put money in thy purse'-this is only as a discipline and means to an end, a discipline consisting not of an arrogant diet of nuts in the heart of the country, but of twelve long painful years in a wilderness that shall at last, it may be, blossom like the rose. And that end is a complete and happy union with the lives of others. Mr. Tagore's gospel is the gospel of love Love is the ultimate meaning of everything around 'us'; and of joy-' Pessimism is a form of mental dipsomania'; 'a thing is only completely our own when it is a joy to us.' Bank-notes and railway stations, love-letters in coloured inks, the man-cheapening of cannibalism-Mr. Tagore refuses no simile to enforce his doctrine. But again and again his illustrations are drawn from art and poetry. The artist 'who has a joy in the fulness of his artistic idea objectifies it and thus gains it more fully by holding it afar.' When man's work is the outcome of joy, the forms that it takes. have the elements of immortality. Every word of a poem is essential to its idea, obeys a metrical law in an inner rhythmical freedom, so, the progress of the soul is like a perfect poem.' 'It moves in obedience to an infinite idea, which, once realised, 'makes all experience "full of meaning and joy." This philosophy is not strange to our minds, however remote it may be from our practice. Mr. Tagore weighs Western ideas in his balance and finds them wanting: he is a wise father gravely taking to book a wanton and headstrong son. The effect of his quiet, winning prose is to paint on his reader's consciousness, as it were, the serene, inscrutable smile on the face of an ancient and beautiful image, promising consolation to every vexed mind that can, however faintly, perceive the symbol of its peace. WALTER DE LA MARE. THE HONEY-BEE 'The birth and genius of the frugal bee, 1. Bees and Wasps. By O. H. LATTER. Cambridge: University Press. 1913. 2. Die Biologie der Biene. By Dr. HANS STADLER. Würtzburg: H. Stürtz. 1911. 3. The Manipulation of the Wax Scales of the Honey Bee. By D. B. CASTEEL. Bureau of Entomology, Circular 161. Washington Government Printing Office. 1912. 4. The Behaviour of the Honey Bee in Pollen Collecting. CASTEEL. Bureau of Entomology, Bulletin 121. ton Government Printing Office. 1912. THE By D. B. Washing HE social life of the honey-bee (Apis mellifica) is more complex than that of any other animal save man, and in some respects the differentiation of the units which compose the society surpasses anything we can recognise in human economy. Among other bees and wasps the future of the race is wrapped up throughout the winter months in the body of one fertilised female; should she die, the particular race is at an end; but the honey-bee colony lives through the winter and is permanent, or at any rate potentially permanent. Although a queen' is cherished, the life of the hive is socialistic. No private property exists; 'all 'is the State's; the State provides for all.' In devotion to duty, in single-mindedness of purpose, in energy expended for others, in whole-hearted devotion to the welfare of the community which shelters her, the worker-bee is unique. As everyone knows, the inhabitants of a hive comprise three ranks of bees. (i) The queen, as a rule but one at a time, is very literally the mother of her people, for she alone lays eggs; (ii) the workers, in structure females though with rare exceptions-never laying eggs, but doing with tireless energy the whole work of the hive; (iii) the drones or males, absolutely useless except that amongst them will be found one-probably the strongest-who fertilises the queen-bee. Let us consider for a brief space the activities of these varying ranks. A hive has swarmed-that is to say, a number of workers, together with a smaller number of drones and the existing queen, have left the hive and are hanging clustered together in a mass of moving insects, perhaps as small as a cricket ball, perhaps five feet in height and at its widest a foot or more in diameter. The swarm either finds a new home for itself in a hollow FIG. 1. HONEY-BEE.-A, Drone; B, Queen; C, Worker. (After As tree, or more usually is hived' by a bee-master in a skip. After cleaning out and if necessary smoothing the walls of their new home, the worker-bees immediately begin the formation of the new combs. An uppermost row of bees clasps the roof of the hive with their fore-legs supporting other rows below them until we find a living veil of bees hanging from the roof of the hive. All these bees are secreting wax on the wax-plates of their abdomens. To produce this they must previously have consumed much honey. Latter tells us that to produce 1 lb. of wax 15 lbs. of honey must be eaten. Fig. 2 shows how the wax-plates are disengaged from the abdomen and passed forward to be moulded by the mandibles. Right and left of this veil of bees will be parallel veils engaged in forming other combs so accurately spaced that ultimately the empty plane between two finished combs is just wide enough to allow two bees to pass each other. The topmost row of bees, after kneading and moulding the wax with their jaws (mandibles), press it in a line along the roof to form a foundation for the comb. This of course is an upside-down foundation, for bees construct their comb from above downwards. More wax is then supplied by the hanging bees below, and passed forward to the builders of the foundation. As soon as the foundation is secured, the living veil disintegrates and the constituent bees begin to work independently at the building of the comb. No bee or group of bees works at one cell or group of cells; always fresh workers are coming and fastening their mite of wax to one or the other part of the comb. All seems unorganised, undirected, confused and without guidance. There is no foreman builder; there is no experience, for many of the builders have scarcely emerged from the pupa stage for three days; there is no means even of seeing, for the inside of a hive is pitch dark. Yet the bees produce with machine like rapidity and mathematical accuracy a cell so uniform in size that 'au 'moment de l'établissement du système décimal, lorsqu'on 'chercha dans la nature une 'mesure fixe qui pût servir de 'point de départ et d'étalon 'incontestable, Réaumur pro'posa l'alvéole de l'abeille.' * FIG. 2 Ventral view of a worker bee in the act of removing a wax scale with its left hind leg. The two middle legs and the right hind leg are used for support. (Casteel.) Bees, and wasps also, have learned that to obtain most space with the use of least material and consequently least labour, the columnar cells should be six-sided in cross-section. The vertical comb of bees consists of two layers of cells back to back. The bottom of each cell is a three-sided pyramid, just the shape that is seen when the eighth part of a cube is removed; on the six edges thus shown the six sides of the cell arise. The walls of the cells are not of uniform thickness; they become thinner as they near the mouth, which, however, has a thickened rim. These cells are all of one size and serve as the homes of the young workers and for the storing of the collected pollen and honey. But after some weeks the inhabitants of the hive begin to * Maeterlinck, 'La Vie des Abeilles,' p. 134. |