destruction of ancient errors; he himself was responsible for
several new ones; he partially understood the formation of swarms
and the political establishment of queens; in a word, he discovered
many difficult truths, and paved the way for the discovery of more.
He fully appreciated the marvellous architecture of the hive; and
what he said on the subject has never been better said. It is to
him, too, that we owe the idea of the glass hives, which, having
since been perfected, enable us to follow the entire private life of
these fierce insects, whose work, begun in the dazzling sunshine,
receives its crown in the darkness. To be comprehensive, one should
mention also the somewhat subsequent works and investigations of
Charles Bonnet and Schirach (who solved the enigma of the royal
egg); but I will keep to the broad lines, and pass at once to
Francois Huber, the master and classic of contemporary apiarian
science.

Huber was born in Geneva in 1750, and fell blind in his earliest
youth. The experiments of Reaumur interested him; he sought to
verify them, and soon becoming passionately absorbed in these
researches, eventually, with the assistance of an intelligent and
faithful servant, Francois Burnens, devoted his entire life to the
study of the bee. In the annals of human suffering and human triumph
there is nothing more touching, no lesson more admirable, than the
story of this patient collaboration, wherein the one who saw only
with immaterial light guided with his spirit the eyes and hands of
the other who had the real earthly vision; where he who, as we are
assured, had never with his own eyes beheld a comb of honey, was yet
able, notwithstanding the veil on his dead eyes that rendered double
the veil in which nature enwraps all things, to penetrate the
profound secrets of the genius that had made this invisible comb; as