The germ of the idea is doubtless to be found in the leaf-hive of Huber, but after his death the principle of separable combs seems to have lapsed into oblivion for 50 years, to be rediscovered simultaneously by Langstroth in America and Dzierzon in Germany. Langstroth began by using as a hive a wooden box without a lid. In place of a lid he arranged a number of movable wooden bars, the ends of which rested on the sides of the box. Over the bars he laid a piece of stout cloth to prevent the bees from escaping. His idea was that the bees should suspend a comb from each bar, so that each comb could be lifted out of the box by the bar. The bees did attach the combs to these bars, but he found that they also attached them to the sides of the box, so that before a comb could be lifted out it had to be severed from the sides of the box with a knife. To remedy this inconvenience he conceived the idea of a "frame," i.e. a parallelogram of wood, suspended in the hive so as to touch neither the bottom nor the sides, and the idea proved completely successful.

Hard on the heels of this innovation came the introduction of artificial wax-foundation. It was known that in making a pound of wax the bees use up perhaps ten pounds of honey; and, in order to save this honey, and at the same time spare the bees the exhausting effort of forming the wax, several people unsuccessfully tried the experiment of fixing thin sheets of wax in the hives. A bee's cell, as everybody knows, is a hexagonal tube half an inch long. A piece of honeycomb consists of two layers of cells placed back to back, and opening in opposite directions. Between the two layers there is a thin partition of wax. This, as Maraldi showed, is not flat, but embossed in small three-sided pyramids. In 1843 Kretchmer, a German (as Mr. Cheshire tells us) conceived the idea of suspending in each "frame" an imitation of this wax partition; he "dipped tracing-paper in molten wax," and embossed it by passing it through specially prepared rollers. The experiment, though not successful, no doubt suggested to Mehring the idea of making "wooden moulds in which the wax, without any linen basis, received the desired shape; and these soon gave way to type-metal plates, the foundation machine of Weiss, the Van Deuzen mill, and other machines, which now turn out tons of 'foundation' of delightful finish and great tenacity."

Next came the ingenious discovery of a means by which honey can be extracted from the honeycomb without involving the destruction of the comb. The old plan was to mash up the comb and strain off the honey through a sieve-a wasteful method, seeing that the bees use so many pounds of honey in making one pound of wax.

It is obvious that if the combs could be emptied without damage, and replaced in the hive so that the bees could fill them again, the saving of time, wax, and honey must be immense. The Count von Hruschka, having observed a naughty boy swinging round his head a lump of honeycomb tied to a piece of string and sprinkling the bystanders with the fine streams of honey thereby projected from the cells, conceived the notion of making the combs revolve round a movable axis in a kind of pail or cylinder of tin. He found that as the combs revolved the honey flew out against the sides of the vessel until every cell was empty. The saving in labour to the beekeeper, as well as to the bees, can only be realised by anyone who has tried the two processes.

During the last thirty years innumerable minor inventions have sprung to light, such as sections, smokers, zigzag porches, combination hives, invertible frames, movable floor-boards, feeders, foundation fixers, queen-excluders, and so forth. These discoveries belong, of course, to the province of art rather than science. But the scientific side of the question has not been neglected. Darwin, in 1859, gave us a very ingenious theory of the probable origin of the cell-making instinct. At the present time the point upon which inquirers seem to be concentrating their attention is the nervous system of bees. We have learnt from Sir J. Lubbock that they can smell, and are able to distinguish colours. It is almost certain that, although deaf to ordinary noises, they can hear notes of a pitch too high for human. ears; the microscopic organs of smell and hearing have been traced in the antennæ; and, in short, the whole anatomy has been investigated with a patient minuteness which can best be appreciated by those who have before them the works of Siebold and Cheshire. Every year brings something new to light, and, complete as our knowledge of the subject now appears to be, it cannot be doubted that much still remains to reward the labours of patient enthusiasts in the future.

R. C. DAY.

I

SOME

JOHNSON CHARACTERISTICS.

PROPOSE to say a word about Johnson's characteristics and writings rather than about his personality, and about the sidelights they throw on the social and political tendencies of his age and of the time that was to come after him. "The past," says Carlyle, " is all holy to us," but Johnson makes the past not only holy, but, what is more to my purpose, actual. Through a wonderfully transparent medium there passes before us a human drama of singularly varied interest, the characters sharply defined, the plot well developed, the scenery picturesque, the dénouement tragically striking, and with a chief actor who holds us with his spell as firmly as the Ancient Mariner held his wedding guest. Much of this we owe to Boswell, but not all. Johnson impressed everybody, even those who hated him, and he left a good broad mark on the history of his time. Being full of ideas, he became a sound, though limited, thinker, a good scholar, a great critic, and almost a great poet. Let us try and watch some of these ideas in their development, and see where they led Johnson, as well as what relations they had to contemporary thought.

Johnson began to be a notable figure in English literature about the middle of the eighteenth century. It was a poorish time to live in. English influence abroad was at its lowest. English morals were not high. English religion, soon to be clarified by the Evangelical revival, was getting very thick and dreggy. The social side is described in Fielding; its religious texture was supplied by writers like Pope, and was little more than Deism, with an easy, shallow, utilitarian basis. "Whatever was, was good "-including Anglican parsons who finished their sixth bottle under the dinner table. English literature, however, was not to be despised. Pope and Addison, Swift and Defoe, were no more; the great work of the three latter in laying the foundation of modern English prose was complete. But in their stead had arisen Richardson and Fielding, and were soon to arise Fanny Burney, and, later still, Jane Austen. We had the

English comedy of manners, the English essay: we were to have the English novel. Greater work than this, however, was on foot. Bishop Berkeley had opened up a new world of mental vision and new avenues for philosophy. The work of Locke in clearing out old metaphysical lumber, and basing knowledge on experience, was to be continued by a greater than he. Butler, when Johnson was a young man, had confounded the Deists by showing that Nature was as cruel as the orthodox scheme which they condemned; the great Hume was soon to use Butler's argument, as he used Locke's philosophy, to buttress a still more advanced sceptical position, and Paley was to deliver the broadside of the orthodox party. But it was France, not England, that was the true seat of the great intellectual warfare of the eighteenth century, to which Carlyle has been so strangely indifferent. Voltaire was great when Johnson was comparatively unknown. Rousseau did his best work almost simultaneously with that of the English writer. Everywhere there were changes and the omens of change. What contribution did Johnson make to them? In order the better to answer this question, it is necessary to say a word of Johnson's personality.

You know it well. Carlyle was troubled with nerves and a stomach, and he let the world know it. Johnson's huge body was an accumulation of physical diseases equalled, I should say, by few, and surpassed by none. He was half-deaf and more than half-blind; he was at times morbid to insanity; he had tendencies to palsy, gout asthma, dropsy; his face was seamed with scrofula; he rarely passed a day without pain. His early life was unhappy and obscure. ills of the scholar's life, which he enumerates in the immortal line:

Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol,

he had known with one exception. He never had a patron. It was the era of free trade in literature, following on a period of thoroughly unhealthy protection. "A man," he said to Boswell, "goes to a bookseller, and gets what he can ; we have done with patronage; " and the letter to Lord Chesterfield-the Magna Charta, as it was, of literary independence simply stated the bare, hard facts of his career. The last thirty years of Johnson's life were secure from want, but the iron had entered into his soul. His character, built up as it was on severe and massive lines, took a permanently gloomy tinge. "The majority of mankind are wicked," was the old Greek text to which he preached many an impressive sermon. The man who had tramped about London with Savage, who had known what it was to go without food for two days, who had sat, a tame author, in Cave's closet, was not a man to join in

the optimist's glib praise of the system of things. There is a piece of work of Johnson's which, in addition to being one of the finest pieces of satire and concentrated argument in the English language, fully explains his moral outlook. Soame Jenyns, outvying Pope, had written a jaunty tract on the origin of evil, which treated poverty and all the ills of life as proper and not unpleasing accidents in the general scheme, especially designed to bring out the goodness of the Creator and the virtues of His creatures. Partial evil was universal good, and so on. Johnson would have none of this. Poverty and crime were not things to be laid with rose-water. "Life," he said, "must be seen before it can be known." This author and Pope perhaps never saw the miseries which they imagine thus easy to be borne. "Pain," he said, scornfully, "is useful to alarm us that we may shun greater evils, but those evils must be presupposed to exist that the fitness of pain may appear." But perhaps the wildest and silliest of Soame Jenyn's fancies was that all the sufferings of man were designed for the amusement and instruction of a superior order of creatures, who watched our contortions much as the angler views the writhings of the fish on his hook. Johnson ridiculed the idea that a set of beings unseen and unheard are "trying experiments on our sensibility, putting us in agonies to see our limbs quiver, torturing us to madness that they may laugh at our vagaries, sometimes obstructing the bile that they may see how a man looks when he is yellow, sometimes breaking a traveller's bone to see how he will get home, and sometimes killing him for the greater elegance of his hide." Least of all could Johnson imagine how men could talk and think lightly of death. He said with Claudio, “Death is a fearful thing." The horror of it shook him all his life through. As human existence was to him a state in which much was to be endured and little to be enjoyed, so the end of it was to be continually dreaded. He closed the series of "Idlers," a charming, and, on the whole, a cheerful series of essays, with the remark, "The secret horror of the last is inseparable from a thinking man, whose life is limited, and to whom death is dreadful.” "Is not the fear of death natural to man?" asked Boswell. "So much so," replied Johnson, "that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it." There was a morbid touch in this, and it throws into relief Johnson's love of company, his pathetic desire to have bright and kind faces around him to ward off the grim spectre he feared. But I dwell on it specially because it gives the key to Johnson's religious fervour. He believed and trembled. Much was mysterious; nearly all was dark; faith was essential. God, he thought, with Addison's Cato, willed the happiness of His creatures, and as that VOL, CCLXVIII. NO. 1910.

M