bees from the beds of bloom, the listener will hear that the work of the interior of the hive is still in full progress.

The gathering of honey is but a small part of the duties upon which the working bees are employed. The comb has to be made; and this is tremendously hard work. Wax is a secretion of the bees. They produce it slowly, and in flakes, from underneath certain scales that open on the abdomen, and convey it with their feet to their mouths to be made moist and ductile. Teeth and tongue together twist and turn it till it is soft and ready for use, and then it is plastered on the foundation, and worked out by the teeth and feet into six-sided cells with absolute mathematical accuracy. The secretion of the wax evidently makes great drafts on the vital strength of the bees, for it is found that they consume twenty pounds of honey for every pound of wax that they produce.

The honey is simp'y the winter store of provender. The baby bees in their grub state are fed on a different kind of food, which also the workers have to gather. This is formed out of the pollen, or fertilizing dust of flowers. Bees, as is well known, perform an essential office in the cross-fertilization of plants (quite unwittingly on their parts, no doubt), by carrying the pollen from one anther to the pistil in another bloom. In this connection, the curious fact is observed that bees do not visit on one and the same journey different kinds of flowers. They collect pollen from all varieties; but with whatever sort they begin, to that sort they keep till they have filled the little baskets that they carry for the purpose on their hind legs. Having flown home, and stored their load in the cells appropriated to it, they may commence again on quite another kind of pollen-bearing blossom. The utility of this arrangement for the flowers is obvious; but it is not so clear how the bee comes to be thus discriminating.

Another substance collected by the bees is called propolis. This is a kind of gum, which they obtain from certain resinous buds, or from the bark of such a tree as the willow. They can extract it also from varnish. It is an old superstition that the bees in an apiary should be informed when their master dies, as they will wish to visit his coffin. Some of those rationalistic people, who cannot be satisfied till NEW SERIES.-VOL. LII., No. 1.

4

they have reduced every relic of more poetic times to a prosaic explanation, have propounded a theory that the bees are attracted to the dead man's habitation to lick off the varnish. In the hive, propolis is used to cement all crevices, and to join all partitions. It is brought into requisition, too, when an enemy invades the hive; he is, if possible, stung to death, and if he be too heavy to remove, he is impermeably sealed up within a propolis tomb.

Those vain human creatures who might be disposed to depreciate the powers of the bees by declaring their achievements to be mere instinct," may be informed that the bees obviously and frequently display a wisdom in the adaptation of means to an end in unusual circumstances which cannot justly be so scornfully described. An instance is recorded where a snail with a shell crawled into a hive. The bees, having slaughtered it, saw that it would be waste of time and strength to cover the shell all over, and contented themselves with hermetically closing it by a layer of propolis round the edges. But a slug, without a shell, having obtained entrance into a hive, the bees covered it completely over with their varnish, so as to effectually prevent its decomposition. Now, if the human creature had some propolis, which in a rare emergency he employed with such just foresight and knowledge, would he not expect to be given credit for something more than instinct"?

Bees are exquisitely clean in their hives. The work of preserving the home in spotless purity, and that of feeding and attending to the grubs in their cells, is done by the youngest bees of the community. When they are a week or two old, they are promoted to the outdoor labors of gathering honey, pollen, and propolis.

The ventilation of the hive is accomplished by extremely hard labor. The bees to whom this task is committed fix their feet tightly to the floor, by means of the suckers which they possess, and then fin with their wings so rapidly that the eye can scarce perceive the movement. A file of bees thus occupied is always found just within the hive door, and a second file similarly engaged, but with their heads turned in the opposite direction, stands on the other side of the hive. Thus a constant current of air is maintained, both from without, inward, and

What would happen to a bee who developed Individualism, or uncommunal or indolent habits, it is difficult to say. Probably, however, what occurs to a disabled bee is a sufficient indication of what would be the fate of one who wished to be a poet, or a painter, or an author, or to follow any of those avocations which your ordinary muscular laborer looks upon as little better than idling. A disabled bee, which is no longer capable of earning its own sustenance, is invariably destroyed by the stings of its fellows. Doubtless, a similar Draconian law long ago eliminated all members of the community who had souls for other things than procuring food and bringing up grubs. Evolution under Socialism has produced a race to whom incessant, violent toil for the support of a large population is the only possibility in existence.

How completely bee life is absorbed in race-perpetuation may be understood when it is stated that the bees, in summer, literally work themselves to death for the support of a posterity whom they will never know. The average life of bees in the honey season is six weeks; while under more easy though otherwise less favorable circumstances, in the winter, a bee will live for six months. Yet they do not despise life; for if a bee is accidentally killed by a person examining the hive, the community resent the loss with the utmost fierceness. The only safety for such an aggressor is to leave the neighborhood of the hive at once, or he will infallibly be severely stung. The bees' nartyrdom to work, then, is a real sacrifice to communal duty.

Thus it appears that Socialism does not relieve the community from premature death, caused by over-exertion for the means of livelihood: only all suffer thus, and not a few. Nor is there any truth, in the bee-socialist's experience, in the flattering promise of Mr. William Morris to ourselves :

Men in that time a-coming shall work and have no fear

For to-morrow's lack of earning, and the hunger-wolf anear.

Famines are not infrequent in the beehive. They populate up to the limit of their calculated food-supply, and if that supply is denied by nature, they starve. Only, all of them starve instead of a few, because they are communists.

Female rights, it may be noted, are rampant in the hive. Those poor, helpless drones are the only specimens of the male sex. The workers, one and all, are imperfectly-developed females. The fact has long been known that the nurses could turn any worker grub under a certain age into a queen by enlarging its cradle, and feeding it on royal baby's food. The presumption from this that the workers were undeveloped females was conclusively proved to be correct by a series of extremely fine dissections, carried out early in this century by Mademoiselle Justine, in which the rudimentary ovaries were displayed.

Behold, then, the conditions upon which the only successful socialistic organization known to us is conducted! If such conditions were in any way possible to mankind, the feasibility of the communistic basis for society could not be denied. But what a prospect! What conditions of existence ! No need to dwell on the far greater difficulty of dividing. the labor necessary for supplying all man's varying and elaborate needs than is presented in arranging the simple duties of the hive. Even if this vast difficulty of organization could be surmounted, what hard cruelty, what grinding toil, what lack of love, hope, and interest attend this system! The almost total extinction of the male sex, the reduction of the vast majority of the female sex to the position of mere toilers for offspring not their own, the rigid limitation of motherhood to selected females, and the denial to them of any other function, the obligation on every individual of untiring, incessant, exhausting toil, rewarded only by the bare necessaries of existence-an obligation enforced we do not know how, but so rigorously carried out that the bulk of each generation dies at a quarter of the normal length of life solely from overwork--the pitiless murder of the sick and useless; such are the conditions of existence in the one successful Socialist community thoroughly known to us. The prospect is not

attractive!-National Review.

pudor!) the railway station not only as omnibuses" but even as 66 tramways. Such is the march of intellect in these latter times, that Venice has nowadays a mounted police in gondolas, and when a fire breaks out in the labyrinth of canals behind the Frari, the fire-engine on duty is rowed to the spot by a crew of stout boatmen in appropriate uniform.

Once in your gondola, on the lion-hunt intent, you must leave behind the golden glories of St. Mark and the Doge's Palace -leave behind the great red and yellow sails of the calm Lagoon-leave behind the bustling crowd and the pigeons of the Piazza, and plunge at once into the narrow waterways that lead into the heart of the people's Venice. The most striking way to approach the Arsenal indeed is to let your gondolier take you round by the church of St. John and St. Paul-San Zanipolo" your true-bred Venetian calls it for short-the Westminster Abbey of defunct dogedom, where thirty generations of most illustrious oligarchs sleep in peace with serene dignity under becoming catafalques of solid marble. But to adopt this route you should provide yourself beforehand with a plentiful stock of moral courage and eau-de-Cologne, for thirty generations of Venetian dirt likewise repose in layers on the muddy bottom, and the air is redolent with the accumulated perfume of fifteen centuries of very imperfect sanitation. The sluggish tide of the Lagoon, and the oars of those poetical but extortionate gondoliers, stir up the festering mass afresh at every turn; so that the romance of the waterways suffers somewhat in real life by the prosaic interposition of that irrepressible sewage question, which all the ingenuity of the most cultured ages has never been able satisfactorily to burke for us. From the banks, young Italy, regenerated Italy, avid of soldi as in the days of the Oppressor, swarms forth from narrow dingy lanes and stretches out its imperfectly washen hands, in a clamorous chorus for the copper coinage of good King Umberto. Regardless of whom, with set face and stern, you still pursue the even tenor of your way along those noiseless streets, to an occasional chorus of Stali" or Premè,' till a sudden swirl of the whishing tide brings the gondola unexpectedly round with a jerk from the Canal della Celestia face to face with the wall of the Arsenal.

A crab-catcher on the bank will hold your boat (and his hat for a sou) as you alight by the door of the famous naval station. At the outer entrance of that sleepy old dock stands the veritable lion whose tale I desire to-day to unfold to you. A marble lion, of antique, not to say archaic, workmanship, he has stood there on guard for two hundred years, with three companions dozing by his side, to watch over the navy of the dead republic and the renascent kingdom of united Italy. But he is by no means by birth a stone of Venice; his origin points to far other days and other manners. As everybody knows, and as an elegant Latin inscription on his base in fact sets forth-I almost scorn to translate it in these latter days, when even ladies lisp to their babes in the purest Ciceronian-he was brought with his three companions from the Piræus in 1687 by the victorious fleet of Doge Francesco Morosini. One of the big beasts mounted guard over the harbor itself; his companion stood beside the Sacred Way that led from Piræus to the city of Athens. But what is oddest of all about this particular lion-the first to the left in front of the massive old fifteenth century gateway-is the fact that his body is covered irregularly with strange inscriptions, some of thein running in a circle round his shoulders, and others sprawling at irregular distances along his lordly flanks and magnificent haunches.

And what is the language, ancient or modern, in which these casual and extremely serpentine inscriptions are couched? Ah, there's the rub. There comes the point which throws at once such a lurid glamour of 10mance and niystery about that grim archaic beast, once the foremost ornament of the harbor of the Piræus, and now the guardian of King Umberto's new-born navy. The letters, if letters indeed they be, are rude and weather-worn; time and rain have almost obliterated them; scarce a single form stands out clear and definite; only a general vague sense of something written now remains of what was once, no doubt, to somebody somewhere a legible and highly valuable inscription. But to modern science and modern archæology the lion's story was for many long years a dead secret. Every key was tried in vain. rude marks on the stone obstinately displayed their native rudeness by refusing

The

to answer any polite inquiries as to their origin and meaning: "What's that to you?" they retorted mutely. They declined to come out as Egyptian hieroglyphics; they refrained from exhibiting themselves as Babylonian cuneiform; they wouldn't even permit themselves to be dexterously twisted, after the fashion of philologists for we must all admit that in philology much can be done by ingenious twisting into Accadian ideograms or Chinese metaphysics. Read forward or backward or upside down they were equally incorrigible. They listened not to the voice of the polyglot charmer, charmed he never so conjecturally and wisely. At last one day a wandering Scandinavian scholar passed that way-one Rafn of Copenhagen and, casting a glance at the mysterious marks, thought he recognized some familiar touch about their curves and angles. He went to work at them with zeal and discretion, and, lo, in the end, it turned out to everybody's immense surprise that the writing on the lion-that Athenian lion, the glory of the Pirans, the brother beast of the guardian of the Sacred Way-was in good Norse runes of the eleventh century !

Now it is this that to my mind gives the lion of the Arsenal such a special and very peculiar interest among all the storied stones of Venice. That he should have come originally from Athens indeed is in itself nothing very remarkable; the noble Venetians of the days of the most serene Republic were such an unmitigated set of thieves and robbers that nothing artistic anywhere came amiss to them.

All was

fish to the net of the Doges. Since the days when that exemplary noble Roman Mummius stripped Corinth of its marble statues, the flower of Greek art, and then informed the bargees whom he hired to carry his plunder to Rome that if they broke any by the way they must replace them themselves with others of equal value, there were never surely such desperate spoilers and robbers of churches as those pious Venetians. All Venice, in fact, is one vast museum of stolen property. A self-righteous inscription over the gateway of St. Mark's informs the visitor, with much show of conscious probity, that the four famous antique bronze horses above the portal, " removed by the rapacity of the enemy to Paris" under Napoleon I., were again restored to their

proper place by that incorruptible champion of strict international morality, the Emperor Francis. But that glorious team, a work of the sculptors of the Neronian age, had previously been stolen in the thirteenth century by the Doge Dandolo from Constantinople, whither they had been carried from Rome, for his own glorification, by Constantine the Great, who had filched them himself from the triumphal arch of Trajan, who in turn had borrowed them, as seems probable; from the similar monument of his predecessor Nero. Such are the humors of the world and the whirligigs of time. Indeed, if every man had his own again, one might almost say there would be no Venice. The column of St. Mark with its winged lion would go back to Syria; the square pillars by the Doge's Palace would return once more to St. Saba, at Ptolemais; the alabaster supports of the inner canopy would find their way back, men say, to Solomon's temple; and even the mouldering body of the Evangelist itself, which reposes beneath its pall of gold and jewels below the high altar, would have to migrate to the community from whom it was first filched, the Coptic Christians of Alexandria.

But apart from the common epic of conquest and robbery which every Venetian relic thus encloses in itself, as of ordinary custom, there is something exceptionally and specifically impressive, to my mind at least, in the marvel of this lion of the Arsenal door-a sculptured figure that thus brings together for a moment, in incongruous juxtaposition on the shores of the Adriatic, the highest culture of Periclean Athens and the rude barbarism of the Danish invaders. Surely such a singular combination as this--the names of Harold aud Ulf and other fierce rovers of the stormy Baltic cut deep on a carved work of the pre-Phidian Greek period on the bays of the Egean-may give us pause for a moment in our gondola on the mudbanks of the Brenta, and cause us to wonder, as the poet wondered of the flies in amber, "how the dickens they got there." Let us try to answer this curious question.

The lions of the Arsenal were originally carved, as the grain of the stone clearly indicates, from two solid blocks of the marble of Pentelicus. The place itself from which they came is not without in