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THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

ART. I.-1. My Bee-book. By William Charles Cotton, M.A., Student of Christ Church, Oxon. London, 1842.

2. The Honey-bee, its Natural History, Physiology, and Management. By Edward Bevan, M.D. London, 1838. 3. Bees; comprehending the Uses and Economical Management of the Honey-bee of Britain and other Countries; together with Descriptions of the known Wild Species. Illustrated with 36 coloured plates. Jardine's Naturalist's Library'— Entomology, Vol. VI. Edinburgh, 1840.

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4. The Management of Bees; with a Description of the Ladies' Safety Hive. By Samuel Bagster, jun. London.

5. Huber's Natural History of the Honey-bee. London, 1841. 6. The Bee-Keeper's Guide; containing concise practical Directions for the Management of Bees upon the Depriving System. By J. H. Payne. London, 1842.

7. Humanity to Honey-bees; a Management of Honey-bees on a New and Improved Plan. By Thomas Nutt. Wisbeach,

1832.

8. A Treatise on the Nature, Economy, and Practical Manage ment of Bees. By Robert Huish. London, 1817.

9. The Cottager's Bee-book. By Richard Smith. Oxford, 1839.

How

[OW the little busy bee improves each shining hour-makes hay when the sun shines-makes honey, that is, when flowers blow, is not only a matter for the poet and the moralist, and the lover of nature, but has become an important subject of rural, and cottage, and even political economy itself. If West Indian crops fail, Brazilian slave-drivers turn sulky, we are convinced that the poor at least may profit as much from their bee-hives as ever they will from the extracted juices of parsneps or beet-root. And in this manufacture they will at least begin the world on a fair footing. No monopoly of capitalists can drive them from a market so open as this. Their winged stock have free pasturage commonage without stint-be the proprietor who he may,

VOL. LXXI. NO. CXLI.

B

wherever

wherever the freckled cowslip springs and the wild thyme blows. Feudal manors and parked royalties, high deer-fences and forbidding boundary belts, have no exclusiveness for them; no action of trespass can lie against them, nor are they ever called upon for their certificates. But if exchange be no robbery, they are no thieves: they only take that which would be useless to all else besides, and even their hard-earned store is but a short-lived possession. The plagiarist Man revenges himself on them for the white lilies they have dusted and disturbed, and makes all their choicely-culled sweets his own. But though he never tasted a drop of their honey, the bees would still accomplish the work that Providence has allotted them in fructifying our flowers and fruit-blossoms, which man can at the best but clumsily imitate, and in originating new varieties which probably far surpass in number and beauty all that has been done by the gardening experimentalist. Florists are apt to complain of the mischief the bee does in disturbing their experiments and crossing species which they wish to keep separate; but they forget how many of their choicest kinds, which are commonly spoken of as the work of chance, have in reality been bee-made, and that, where man fructifies one blossom, the bee has worked upon ten thousand.

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It is certain, however, that the great interest taken in bees from the earliest times, and which, judging from the number of books lately published, is reviving among us with no common force, has arisen chiefly from the marked resemblance which their modes of life seem to bear to those of man. move every fanciful theory and enthusiastic reverie, and there still remains an analogy far too curious to be satisfied with a passing glance. On the principle of nihil humani à me alienum,' this approximation to human nature has ever made them favourites with their masters. And theirs is no hideous mimicry of man's follies and weaknesses, such as we see in the monkey tribe, which to us has always appeared too much of a satire to afford unalloyed amusement: their life is rather a serious matter-of-fact business, a likeness to the best and most rational of our manners and government, set about with motives so apparently identical with our own, that man's pride has only been able to escape from the ignominy of allowing them a portion of his monopolized Reason, by assigning them a separate quality under the name of Instinct. The philosophers of old were not so jealous of man's distinctive quality; and considering how little at the best we know of what reason is, and how vain have been the attempts to distinguish it from instinct, there may be, after all, notwithstanding the complacent smile of modern sciolists, as much truth, as certainly there is

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