Will you kindly facsimile with moderate care, the above
piece of ancient manuscript in Fors.
It would be difficult to give more distinct evidence than is furnished
by these pieces of manuscript, of the incurably desultory character
which has brought on me the curse of Reuben, “Unstable as water, thou
shalt not excel.” But I reflect, hereupon, with resolute
self-complacency, that water, when good, is a good thing, though it be
not stable; and that it may be better sometimes to irrigate than excel.
And of the advantage, in many respects, of learning to write and read,
if at all, in the above pictorial manner, I have much to say on some
other occasion; but, having to-day discoursed enough about myself, will
assume that Agnes, wholly at her own sweet will, has made shift to
attain the skill and temper necessary for the use of any kind of good
book, or bible. It is, then, for the St. George’s Company to see that
all the bibles she has, whether for delight or instruction, shall be
indeed holy bibles; written by persons, that is to say, in whom the
word of God dwelt, and who spoke or wrote according to the will of God;
and, therefore, with faithful purpose of speaking the truth touching
what they had to tell, or of singing, rhyming, or what not else, for
the amusement whether of children or grown-up persons, in a natural,
modest, and honest manner, doing their best for the love of God and
men, or children, or of the natural world; and not for money, (though
for the time necessary to learn the arts of singing or writing, such
honest minstrels and authors, manifestly possessing talent for their
business, should be allowed to claim daily moderate maintenance, and
for their actual toil, in performance of their arts, modest reward, and
daily bread).
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. [8] Nor have I any objection to the 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 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 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 [9] 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 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
“a, the labium, with the two labial palpi;
b, the maxilla, whose basilar portions bear at one end the cardo,
at the other the hairy galea and the maxillary palpas;
c, the labrum, and d, the mandible,”
Agnes and I perceive that for the present there is an end of the matter
for us; and retreat to our Bingley, there to console ourselves with
hearing how Mr. Wildman, whose remarks on the management of bees are
well known, possessed a secret by which “he could at any time cause a
hive of bees to swarm upon his head, shoulders, or body, in a most
surprising manner. He has been seen to drink a glass of wine, having at
the same time the bees all over his head and face more than an inch
deep: several fell into the glass, but they did not sting him. He could
even act the part of a general with them, by marshalling them in battle
array upon a large table. There he divided them into regiments,
battalions, and companies, according to military discipline, waiting
only for his word of command. The moment he uttered the word ‘march!’
they began to march in a regular manner, like soldiers. To these
insects he also taught so much politeness, that they never attempted to
sting any of the numerous company.”
Agnes, on reading this, is sure to ask me ‘how he taught them?’ Which
is just what, as a student of new methods of education, I should like
to know myself; and not a word is said on the matter: and we are
presently pushed on into the history of the larger animal which I call
a humble, but Agnes, a bumble, bee. Not, however, clearly knowing
myself either what the ways of this kind are, or why they should be
called humble, when I always find them at the top of a thistle rather
than the bottom, I spend half my morning in hunting through my
scientific books for information on this matter, and find whole pages
of discussion whether the orange-tailed bee is the same as the
white-tailed bee, but nothing about why either should be called humble
or bumble:—at last I bethink me of the great despiser of natural
history; and find that stout Samuel, with his good editor Mr. Todd,
have given me all I want; but there is far more and better authority
for ‘bumble’ than I thought. However;—this first guess of Johnson’s own
assuredly touches one popular, though it appears mistaken, reason for
the Shakespearian form. “The humble bee is known to have no sting. The
Scotch call a cow without horns a ‘humble cow.’” But truly, I have
never myself yet had clear faith enough in that absence of sting to
catch a humble bee in my fingers; [10] only I suppose Bottom would have
warned Cobweb against that danger, if there had been such, as well as
against being overflown with the honey bag. [11] Red-hipped, Bottom
calls them; and yet I find nothing about their red hips anywhere in my
books.
We have not done with the name yet, however. It is from the Teutonic
‘hommolen,’ bombum edere: (in good time, some years hence, Agnes shall
know what Teutons are,—what bombs are,—shall read my great passage in
‘Unto this Last’ about bombshells and peaches; and shall know how
distinct the Latin root of Edition and Editor is from that of
Edification).
Next,—Chaucer, however, uses ‘humbling’ in the sense of humming or
muttering: “like to the humblinge after the clap of a thunderinge.” So
that one might classically say—a busy bee hums and a lazy bee humbles;
only we can’t quite rest even in this; for under Bumble-bee in Johnson,
I find a quantity of other quotations and branched words, going off
into silk and bombazine;—of which I shall only ask Agnes to remember—
“The Bittern, with his bump,
The crane, with his trump,”
and Chaucer’s single line,
“And as a bytorne bumblith in the mire.”
This, however, she should write out carefully, letter by letter, as
soon as she had learned to write; and know at least that the image was
used of a wife telling her husband’s faults—and, in good time, the
whole story of Midas. Meanwhile, we remain satisfied to teach her to
call her large brown friends, humble bees, because Shakespeare does,
which is reason enough: and then the next thing I want to know, and
tell her, is, why they are so fond of thistles. Before she can know
this, I must be able to draw a thistle-blossom rightly for her; and as
my botany has stood fast for some years at the point where I broke down
in trying to draw the separate tubes of thistle-blossom, I can’t say
any more on that point to-day: but, going on with my Bingley, I find
four more species of bees named, which I should like to tell Agnes all
I could about: namely, the Mason Bee; the Wood-piercing Bee; and the
one which Bingley calls the Garden Bee; but which, as most bees are to
be found in gardens, I shall myself call the Wool-gathering Bee; the
Leaf-cutting Bee.
1. The mason bee, it appears, builds her nest of sand, which she
chooses carefully grain by grain; then sticks, with bee-glue, as many
grains together as she can carry, (like the blocks of brick we see our
builders prepare for circular drains)—and builds her nest like a
swallow’s, in any angle on the south side of a wall; only with a number
of cells inside, like—a monastery, shall we say?—each cell being about
the size of a thimble. But these cells are not, like hive bees’,
regularly placed, but anyhow—the holes between filled up with solid
block building;—and this disorder in the architecture of mason bees
seems to be connected with moral disorder in their life; for, instead
of being ‘so eager to afford mutual assistance’ that one can’t see what
each is doing, these mason bees, if they can, steal each other’s nests,
just like human beings, and fight, positively, like Christians.
“Sometimes the two bees fly with such rapidity and force against each
other that both fall to the ground”; and the way their cells are
built—back of one to side of the other, and so on, is just like what a
friend was telling me only the day before yesterday of the new cottages
built by a speculative builder, who failed just afterwards, on some
lots of land which a Lord of the Manor, near my friend, had just stolen
from the public common and sold.
2. The wood-piercing bee cuts out her nest in decayed wood; the nest
being a hollow pipe like a chimney, or a group of such pipes, each
divided by regular floors, into cells for the children; one egg is put
in each cell, and the cell filled with a paste made of the farina of
flowers mixed with honey, for the young bee to eat when it is hatched.
Now this carpentering work, I find, is done wholly by the wood-piercing
bee’s strong jaws; but here again is no picture of her jaws, or the
teeth in them; though the little heaps of sawdust outside where she is
working “are of grains nearly as large as those produced by a handsaw”;
and she has to make her floors of these grains, by gluing them in
successive rings from the outside of her cell to the centre. Yes;
that’s all very well; but then I want to know if she cuts the bits of
any particular shape, as, suppose, in flattish pieces like tiles, and
if then she glues these sideways or edgeways in their successive rings.
But here is the prettiest thing of all in her work. It takes, of
course, a certain time to collect the farina with which each cell is
filled, and to build the floor between it and the nest; so that the
baby in the room at the bottom of the pipe will be born a day or two
before the baby next above, and be ready to come out first; and if it
made its way upwards, would disturb the next baby too soon. So the
mother puts them all upside down, with their feet—their tails, I should
say—uppermost; and then when she has finished her whole nest, to the
last cell at the top, she goes and cuts a way at the bottom of it, for
the oldest of the family to make her way out, as she naturally will,
head-foremost, and so cause the others no discomfort by right of
primogeniture.
3. The wool-gathering bee is described by White of Selborne, as
“frequenting the Garden Campion, for the sake of its Tomentum.” I lose
half an hour in trying to find out the Garden Campion among the
thirty-two volumes of old Sowerby: I find nothing but the sort of white
catchfly things that grow out of hollow globes, (which Mary of the
Giessbach, by the way, spoken of in a former letter, first taught me to
make pops with). I vainly try to find out what “Campion” means. Johnson
fails me this time. “Campion, the name of a plant.” I conjecture it
must be simple for champion, “keeper of the field,”—and let that pass;
but lose myself again presently in the derivation of Tomentum, and its
relation to Tome, in the sense of a volume. Getting back out of all
that, rather tired, I find at last in Bingley that the Garden Campion
is Agrostemma Coronaria of Linnæus; and I look in my Linnæus, and find
it described as Tomentosum; and then I try my two Sowerbys, ancient and
modern, where I find nothing under Agrostemma but the corn-cockle, and
so have to give in at last; but I can tell Agnes, at least, that
there’s some sort of pink which has a downy stem, and there’s some sort
of bee which strips off the down from the stalk of this pink, “running
from the top to the bottom of a branch, and shaving it bare with all
the dexterity of a hoop-shaver.”
Hoop-shaver? but I never saw so much as a hoop-shaver! Must see one on
the first chance, only I suppose they make hoops by steam now.
“When it has got a bundle almost as large as itself it flies away,
holding it secure between its chin and forelegs.”
Chin?—what is a bee’s chin like?
Then comes a story about a knight’s finding the key wouldn’t turn in
the lock of his garden gate; and there being a wool-gathering bee’s
nest inside: and it seems she makes her cells or thimbles of this wool,
but does not fill them with honey inside; so that I am in doubt whether
the early life of the young bees who live in wood, and have plenty to
eat, be not more enviable than the lot of those who live in wool and
have no larders. I can’t find any more about the wool-gatherer; and the
fourth kind of bee, most interesting of all, must wait till next Fors’
time, for there’s a great deal to be learnt about her.
‘And what of the St. George’s Company meanwhile’?
Well, if I cannot show it some better method of teaching natural
history than has been fallen upon by our recent Doctors, we need not
begin our work at all. We cannot live in the country without hunting
animals, or shooting them, unless we learn how to look at them.