this the more, because the Ant, though it wisely provides for its daily bread, does not lay up the winter store wherewith to fare sumptuously every day.

a needle's point seem a quarter of an inch, it would yet itself be invisible, and this too a hollow tube-that all these varied operations and contrivances should be inclosed within half an inch of length and two grains of matter, while in the same "small room" the "large heart" of at least thirty* distinct instincts is contained-is surely enough to crush all thoughts of atheism and materialism, without calling in the aid of twelve

But we must hasten to end this too long

We know that, in saying this, we are flying into the uplifted eyes of careful mothers and bachelor uncles, who time out of mind have quoted, as it has been quoted to them, the busy bee as the sure exemplar of worldly prudence and prosperity; but we think that we can show them a more excel-heavy volumes of Bridgewater Treatises. lent way even for earthly honor, if they, as Christ's servants, will content themselves paper. Its readers generally will be above with those types in the natural world which that class to whom profit, immediate or He himself has given them, and learn that remote, from bee-keeping can be of any quiet security, and trustful contentedness, serious moment-though indeed the profit and ready obedience, and active labor for lies in saving the bees, not in killing them. the present hour, which He has severally But many prejudices have to be done away, pointed out to us in the lilies, the ravens, and greater care bestowed, and a better the sheep, and the emmets, rather than seek knowledge of their habits acquired, before elsewhere for an emblem of that over-curi- the murdering system can be eradicated ous forecasting for the future, which, wheth- from the poor. It is for the higher classes er in things spiritual or temporal, is plainly to set the example by presents of cheap discouraged in the word of God-those and simple but better-constructed hiveslaws and judgments of the Lord which are by personal interest taken in their beesweeter than the honey and the honey-comb, management-by supplying them with the and in the keeping of which "there is great reward."

"Take that; and he that doth the ravens feed,
Yea, providently caters for the sparrow,
Be comfort to my age!"

best-written bookst on the subject-above all, by adopting the merciful system in their own gardens, and intrusting their hives to the especial care of one of the under-gardeners, whose office it should be, not only to diligently tend and watch his master's Not but that the Bee affords us a moral, stock, but also to instruct the neighboring though it be not that which worldly wisdom cottagers in the most improved managecommonly assigns to it. We have in the ment. It would be an excellent plan to atfirst place a direct cause for thankfulness tach a stall of bees to the south wall of a in the delicate food with which it supplies gardener's cottage or lodge, with a glass us. "The Bee is little among such as fly; side towards the interior, so that the opbut her fruit is the chief of sweet things"- erations of the bees might be watched from (Eccles. xi. 3); and the Almighty has, in within. The custom of placing them withmany senses, and in no common cases, sup-in an arched recess in the wall of the house plied the houseless and the wanderer, with "wild honey" and "a piece of honeycomb," and "honey out of the stony rock;" and "a land flowing with milk and honey" has been from the first the type of another and a better country. And the little honeymaker is itself indeed one of the most wonderful proofs of the goodness and power of God. That within so small a body should be contained apparatus for converting the "virtuous sweets" which it collects into one kind of nourishment for itself-another for the common brood, a third for the royal -glue for its carpentry-wax for its cells -poison for its enemies-honey for its master-with a proboscis almost as long as the body itself, microscopic in its several parts, telescopic in its mode of actionwith a sting so infinitely sharp, that, were it magnified by the same glass which makes

was one of old Rome, and is still observed in some countries. We look upon this as a very pretty suggestion for a fancy cottage in any style of architecture. Perhaps the directors of our normal schools would find no better way of teaching their pupilschoolmasters how to benefit and gain an influence among the parents of the children they will have to instruct, than to put them in the proper way of making and managing the new kinds of cottage-hives, of taking honey, joining stocks, and hybernating the bees. We spoke in a late article of Gardening being a common ground for the rich and poor. We would mark this difference with regard to Bees, that we consider them

* Kirby and Spence. Introd. to Ent., ii. 504.

book, which advocates all the atrocities of the old + Let no one be misled by the title of Mr. Smith's system.

mended by a host-that you must either like them very much or not at all. "Beaucoup de gens aiment les abeilles: je n'ai vu personne qui les aima médiocrement; on se passionne pour elles!" It was this love we suppose that led Mahomet to make an exception in their favor when all other flies were

"That tasks not one laborious hour."

especially the "Poor man's stock." Nol We said, if any man would keep bees, he wealthy man should keep large colonies of must make them his friends;-nay, that is them for profit, in a neighborhood where a cold word-he must love them. De Gethere are cottagers ready to avail themselves lien makes the remark,-which we have of the advantage. A hive or two in the heard before of figs, and olives, and medlars, garden-good old-fashioned straw-hives-and truffles, or of an equivocal dish recomfor the sake of their pleasing appearance and kindly associations, and for the good of the flowers-is only what every gentleman would delight to have; or, if he has time to devote to their history, an observatory-hive for study and experiment; but beyond this we think he should not go,else he is certainly robbing his poorer condemned;-that made Napoleon, who neighbors. The gentleman-bee-master, like laughed at the English as a nation of shopthe gentleman-farmer, should only keep keepers, select this emblem of industry, in stock enough for encouragement and ex- place of the idle lily, periment, and leave the practical and profitable to the cottager and the tenant. But the squire's hive and implements And Urban VIII. and Louis XII. adopted should be of the best construction, for ex- them as the device on their coat of arms; ample's sake; and, keep he bees or beasts, and Camdeo, the Cupid of Budhism, strung he should be "a merciful man" to them. his bow with bees! The Athenians ranked And surely the feeling mind will pause a the introduction of the Bee among their little at the destruction of a whole nation- great national blessings, tracing it up to Cethe demolition of a whole city, with all its crops, "the friend of man,"-the Attic Albuildings, streets and thoroughfares, its fred; and such regard is still paid to them palaces, its Queen, and all! What an earth- in many parts of the south of England, that quake to them must be the moving of the no death, or birth, or marriage takes place hive! What a tempest of fire and brim- in the family without its being communicastone must the deadly fumes appear! All ted to the bees, whose hive is covered in their instincts, their senses, their habits the first case with a piece of black cloth, plead for them to our humanity; and, even if we allege their sting against them, they may reply with scarcely an alteration in the Jew's words "Hath not a Bee eyes? hath not a Bee organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh if you poison us, do we not die and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."

in the two latter with red. The 10th of August is considered their day of Jubilee, and those who are seen working on that day are called Quakers. Omens were wont to be taken from their swarming; and their settling on the mouths of Plato and Pindar was taken as a sure presage of the sweetness of their future eloquence and poetry; though these legends are somewhat spoiled, by the same event being related of the infancy of Lucan and of St. Ambrose, called, as was Vives afterwards, the Mellifluous Doctor. We all know of Nestor's "honeyed" words, and Xenophon, "cujus sermo est melle dulcior." Bees have not only dispers. Janissaries; but it would be quite imposed a mob, but defeated an Amurath with his

against. However, the most general and the shortest rule is, send your bees off to sleep in good condition in the autumn (i e. supply them with plenty of food then), for all hybernating animals are fat at the beginning of their torpidity, and it is fat people who fall fastest to sleep after dinner-keep them torpid, by even coolness and dryness, as long as you can. No bee-master will ever be successful who does not take pains of some sort to effect these objects.

• The subjects of hybernating bees and of joining swarms are so very important in good bee-keeping, that, being connected with one another, we must say a word, though a short one, upon them. Though the opposite opinion has been stoutly maintained, it is now generally admitted that a united stock does not consume so much honey in the winter as the two swarins separately would have done. But in order to save the consumption of honey at this time, the bees must be kept as torpid as possible, and this is best done by placing them in a cold, dark, but dry room. If you have not this convenience, move the doors from the north of your bee-house to the south, The Abbé della Rocca relates that "when Amuso that the winter sun, being prevented from shining rath, the Turkish emperor, during a certain siege, on the entrance side, will not enliven and draw out had battered down part of the wall, and was about the bees when the snow is on the ground. This to take the town by assault, he found the breach demost fatal circumstance it is most essential to guard | fended by bees, many hives of which the inhabitants

sible in a sketch like this to attempt to give
any thing like a full account of their many
honors and achievements, and of the ex-
traordinary instinct displayed by them in
every operation of their manifold works.
Our object in these remarks has been ra-
ther to stimulate the novice in this subject
than to give any complete history of their
habits, or to put forth any new discovery or
system of our own. We have introduced
our little friends with our best grace, and
must leave them now to make the best of
their way with our readers.

"So work the Honey Bees:
Creatures that, by a rule in nature, teach
The art of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king, and officers of sorts:
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad;
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds;
Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent royal of their emperor;
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold;
The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate;
The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o'er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone."

Henry V. a. 1, s. 2.

Who would not affirm, from this and other incidental allusions, that Shakspeare had a hive of his own? Dr. Bowring has only been able to discover in them "galleries of art and schools of industry, and professors teaching eloquent lessons;" perhaps our friend means Mechanics' Institutes, and travelling lecturers.

GLACIAL THEORY.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

ested in the articles on the Glacial Theory, translated from the German of Agassiz, that we doubt not we shall afford them pleasure by offering for their perusal the following article on the same subject, presenting a modified view of this Theory. The source, from which it comes, must commend it to the attention of scientific men: and Americans must be gratified with the ascription of the original suggestion of the "best glacial theory" to our own countryman, Peter Dobson. It is found in "Remarks on Boulders, by Peter Dobson," published in the American Journal of Science, for 1826, and contains, says Mr. Murchison, the essence of the modified glacial theory at which we have arrived after so much debate.-ED.

THE readers of the Eclectic were so much inter

From the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal.

On the Glacial Theory. By Roderick Impey Murchison, Esq., President of the Geological Society, &c.*

FROM a study of the Alps, where Venetz and Charpentier led the way in showing that a connection existed between the erratic blocks and the advance of glaciers, Professor Agassiz has deduced a glacial theory, and has endeavored to generalize and effort he has been supported by my predeapply it even to our own countries, in which cessor in the chair. In the following observations, I will endeavor to point out what new materials have been brought forward, abroad and at home, to enable us to reason correctly on this difficult question, and I will then suggest some essential modifications of the new hypothesis.

As propounded by Agassiz, the glacial theory, even in its application to the Alps, has met with an opponent in the person of Professor Necker de Saussure. In the first volume of a work which he is now publishing, M. Necker treats, in great detail, the nected with the northern and western waterwhole subject of superficial detritus conshed of the Alps, and gives us the fruits of many years of observation. Adding very considerably to the list of phenomena of transported materials collected by M. A. de Luc, he takes his own illustrious ancestor, De Saussure, as his model, and following in the track of the historian of the Alps he endeavors to enlarge and improve upon that great observer's suggestions. Pointing out the distinction between two classes of detritus, viz., one of high antiquity and another of modern date, M. Necker contends that the enormous masses of the

From the address delivered at the Anniversary Meeting of the Geological Society of London, 1842.

tracts which exhibit, here and there, proofs of having been an ancient bottom of a sea. But without extending his theory to other parts of the world, it does not appear to me, even when confined to the Alps, that M. Necker explains satisfactorily how the granite blocks of Mont Blanc should lie upon the Jura, by any reference to sub-aerial debacle; for if we are to imagine the deep hollow of the lake of Geneva filled up with gravel, sand, and mud, and forming an inclined talus from the centre to the flanks of the chain, the subsequent scooping out of this enormous mass of materials involves an intensity of degradation as difficult to believe in as the former extreme climate of Agassiz, by which thousands of feet of snow and ice are supposed to have occupied the same deep valley. I ought not to omit to state, that one of the chief elements introduced by Agassiz into this question, the polished and striated surfaces of the rocks, has not been alluded to by this author, but will be treated of in his second volume.

ancient drift or deluvial detritus have a di- the uppermost or last surface deposit in rect conneciton with the actual configuration of the surface, because the chief part of them has been derived from the centre of the chain, the flanking and lower mountains, and even the strata on which it rests, having contributed comparatively little to the great advancing body. Examining the high valleys about Chamouni and the foot of Mont Blanc, and finding massive walls from 300 to near 600 feet in height, composed of this ancient diluvium in its coarsest form, near the extremities of certain glaciers, he concludes that they were once the moraines of glaciers which melted away and retired from them. He then goes on to suppose that when the recession of the glaciers took place (an effect which he refers to the same cause as De Saussure), such transversed moraines formed dykes standing out at some distance from the mountain and barred up lakes formed by the melting of the snow and ice. These lakes, at length swollen to excess, are supposed to have burst through the moraine barrier, and to have drifted the materials of which it was In the mean time, however he may fail composed into the lower countries. M. to account satisfactorily for the transport Necker believes that when these ancient of the very distant great blocks, we have to glaciers existed, the Alps were consider- thank M. Necker for the additional maably higher than at present, and he judges terials, which seem to establish one fundathat such was the case, because the "ai- mental fact in reference to the Alpine case, guilles," of Mont Blanc have been lowered viz., when this detritus was cast off, the very considerably in our own time. Argu- gorges and flanks of the chain had nearly ing that great blocks are never found at the the same reference to the central crest as foot of mountain chains which have not per- that which now prevails. If this be proved, manent glaciers, of what De Saussure called the theory which depends chiefly upon the the "first class," he cites many negative supposition, that a great elevation of the examples, and brings forward the Pyrenees, centre of the chain broke off the ice and where no true erratic blocks are seen, as a dislodged the glaciers, is deprived of its proof that the minor or second class gla-chief basis. In what manner Professor ciers, which there occur, never advanced Agassiz can account for the Alps being a sufficiently far to dam up water-courses, great centre of dispersion when at a lower and thus to form those great lakes, to the level, is indeed a part of his theory which is letting off of which and to the destruction not easily comprehended. On the other of vast moraines, he attributes the presence of large boulders in the Alps.

I must, however, remind M. Necker, that if he assumes that all great erratic blocks are to be referred to some neighboring chain, now the seat of glaciers, he forgets the cases in Scotland and England, and indeed many others, far removed from mountain ranges, and which must be classed, as I shall presently show, with submarine deposits. Indeed, by far the widest spread of erratic blocks with which we are acquainted, extending over the plains of Germany and Russia, must have taken place (as I believe at least) when those flat regions were beneath the sea; for recent observations have shown, that the blocks constitute

hand, whatever we may think of M. Necker's hypothesis, it must be admitted that the facts adduced by him support one esential point of the glacialists, by connecting the presence of blocks with the existence of glaciers in the Alps, the former being, as he states, invariably found both in the southern and northern watersheds of those mountains, and at the mouths of the great transverse ravines which lead up to the regions of perpetual snow, and in all such cases he allows that the condition of the blocks is highly indicative of their having once formed part of the "moraines" produced by former glaciers.

But the important point, that the glacier is the chief source of the origin of erratic

blocks, is entirely denied by another antagonist to the theory of Agassiz, who has appeared in the person of M. Godeffroy.* After the observations of two summers in the Alps, this author has become convinced that the materials of the so-called moraines have not been derived simply by the glacier from the solid rock in the higher mountains, but are the re-arranged portions only of a great pre-existing diluvial deposit, which had been accumulated in the radiating valleys during a period of great disturbance, anterior to the existence of glaciers in that latitude. Describing (like M. Necker) one of these "trainées" as having a continuous length of fifteen leagues, he infers that such a mass could never have been deposited by a glacier proceeding from mountains of no greater altitude than the Alps. Arguing that glaciers are merely the condensed or central portions of vast accu. mulations of snow, forced downwards into the gorges by increasing volume from above, the chief novelty of M. Godeffroy's work is contained in the opinion, that in advancing, these bodies of ice cut through the ancient diluvium or drift, just as a ploughshare cleaves the soil ("presso tellus consurgit aratro" being his motto), and threw up some portions into lateral moraines, as well as pressed before them others to form terminal moraines. To the crystalline and mechanical changes which the snow has undergone in its passage into solid ice, is attributed much of the confusion, and irregularity of outline so visible in the "aiguilles" and other icy masses of the Alps; and to the same disturbing action is referred the rounded and worn exterior of the boulders in moraines, as contrasted with comparatively angular blocks of the pre-existing drift which have not been in contact with the glacier. I refer you to the book of M. Godeffroy for the explanation of the manner in which he supposes the surface of the advancing or retreating glacier was subjected to lateral overflows or "écroulmens" of stones, gravel, and earth, and also for his theory of medial moraines; but I now bring to your notice his ingenious effort to solve one of the very difficult climatological problems in the Alps. Having shown how the lower valleys must, from year to year, become more and more encumbered with detritus, he seizes this fact to explain by it alone, both the well-known retreat of the glaciers and the fact brought forward by Venetz and other observers; viz., that roads which existed in certain

*Notice sur les Glaciers, les Moraines et les Blocs Erratiques, 1840.

VOL. I. No. III.

34

former passes of the high Alps are now quite choked up with snow and ice-a fact which has been supposed to indicate a sensible decrease of temperature within the historic era. M. Godeffroy contends, that in ancient times, when the gorges were more open, and the heaps of detritus at the entrance into the lower valleys were less in size and fewer in number, and when consequently the glaciers easily extended to greater distances, the continual and unrestricted supply of snow and ice from many affluents more than countervailed the loss through atmospheric action; but that as the obstacles increased at some distance above the terminal moraine, the lower ends of the glaciers not being so fed as to regain in one season the melting losses of the previous year, the inevitable result was a successive shrinkage and retrocession of the mass. The increase of snow and ice in the upper passes, and the blocking up of the roads, are explained by the same agency; for as soon as the descent of the glacier from the higher to the lower Alps was impeded, it would follow, that the frozen matter of the higher regions, deprived of its previous exit, must find its way into the adjacent upper depressions, and there form those mers de glace which have obstructed the road-ways or passes of our ancestors. Thus is the supposed anomaly explained without recurring to any change of climate.*

In that part of our country to which the glacial theory has been applied, Mr. Charles Maclaren, already known to you by excellent geological treatises, has recently published a well-condensed small work explaining the views of Agassiz. The phenomenon of glaciers and the general doctrines derived from their study being explained, Mr. Maclaren proceeds to analyze those cases of transported detritus in the neighborhood of Edinburgh to which the theory had been supposed to apply.

A year and half only has elapsed since Professor Agassiz and Dr. Buckland seemed to think, that this district was as rich in proofs of the action of glaciers as many other parts of Scotland which they visited, and as I happened to witness the efforts of

I hoped to have been able to quote the opinions of Professor J. Forbes on this vexata quæstio, because it is well known that he was a companion of Professor Agassiz in the Alps during the last summer, but this distinguished cultivator of physical science has not yet published his views on the action of glaciers as affecting the surface of the earth, though he has given to the public a very ingenious sketch, descriptive of a peculiar parallel striation in the solid ice of glaciers.-Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, January, 1842.