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How it had been defended by the Dutch patriot, Van Swammerdam, against the united forces of the Duke of Alva and Marshal Turenne, whose leg was shot off as he was leading the last unsuccessful assault, and who turned round to his aide-de-camp and said, "Allez dire an Premier Consul, que je meurs avec regret de ne pas avoir assez fait pour la France!" which gave Lady Kicklebury an opportunity to placer her story of the Duke of York, and the bombardment of Valenciennes; and caused young Hicks to look at me in a puzzled and appealing manner and hint that I was "chaffing."

Even so do butterflies come out of silkworms, an instance where M. Swammerdam has shown that there is nothing but development. And I would have added that nothing is better qualified than the preformation of plants and of animals to confirm my System of Pre-established Harmony between the soul and the body.

Swammerdam founded the true methods of scientific investigation; he invented the microscope, contrived injections to ward off decay, was the first to dissect the bees, and by the discovery of the ovaries and the oviduct definitely fixed the sex of the queen, hitherto looked upon as a king, and threw the whole political scheme of the hive into most unexpected light by basing it upon maternity.

Had he not made preparations of the very coleoptera the Scarabee studied so exclusively, preparations which the illustrious Swammerdam would not have been ashamed of, and dissected a melolontha as exquisitely as Strauss Durckheim himself ever did it? The little dried-up specialist did not dilate into fighting dimensions as perhaps, again the Master may have thought he would.

It is well, however, to add this detail, but little known: before Swammerdam a Flemish naturalist named Clutius had arrived at certain important truths, such as the sole maternity of the queen and her possession of the attributes of both sexes, but he had left these unproved.

Had he not made preparations of the very coleoptera the Scarabee studied so exclusively, preparations which the illustrious Swammerdam would not have been ashamed of, and dissected a melolontha as exquisitely as Strauss Durckheim himself ever did it? The little dried-up specialist did not dilate into fighting dimensions as perhaps, again the Master may have thought he would.

But these dealt rather with the legend of the bee; and all that we can gather therefrom which indeed is exceedingly little we may find condensed in the fourth book of Virgil's Georgics. The real history of the bee begins in the seventeenth century, with the discoveries of the great Dutch savant Swammerdam.

Flies get entry into your mouth, into your eyes, into your nose; you eat flies, drink flies, and breathe flies. Lizards, cockroaches, and snakes, got into the bed; ants eat up the books; scorpions sting you on the foot. Every thing bites, stings, or bruises; every second of your existence you are wounded by some piece of animal life that nobody has over seen before, except Swammerdam and Meriam.

That even the commonest insects enjoy such organisms is shown in their anatomy as described by some writers, and especially by Swammerdam, in his Biblia Naturae. Those who ascribe everything to nature, see all these things, but they merely perceive that they exist, and say that nature produces them.

The accurate investigation of the lowest forms of animal life, commenced by Leeuwenhoek and Swammerdam, and continued by the remarkable labours of Reaumur, Trembley, Bonnet, and a host of other observers, in the latter part of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries, drew the attention of biologists to the gradation in the complexity of organisation which is presented by living beings, and culminated in the doctrine of the "echelle des etres," so powerfully and clearly stated by Bonnet; and, before him, adumbrated by Locke and by Leibnitz.