y few steps the
evidence of similar tragedies. Those of you who live in the country
must often have seen on palings little heaps containing a dozen or
more of the small yellow Microgaster Cocoons, and if these are
examined carefully they will be found to be surrounding the skin of a
caterpillar. These minute cocoons may be kept under a wine glass and,
from each a minute Ichneumon Fly, with (if a female) its sharp
ovipositor, will emerge in due time. It is curious what mistakes can
be made even by intelligent persons. I have had the skin of the
caterpillar and this little heap of yellow Microgaster Cocoons sent me
to examine, and have been seriously asked whether this was not a true
case of Parthenogenesis; the suggestion being that the caterpillar had
actually laid eggs, instead of waiting until it had become a moth, and
that its efforts, to alter the course of nature, had been too much for
its constitution and it had died in the act! There are other
illustrations I should have liked to give but space will not permit,
the most remarkable being, perhaps, the knowledge a Queen Bee
possesses of the proximity of another Queen, even when that other is
still in the pupa state, sealed up in a waxen cell. I have made
numerous experiments with Queens of the common black English Bee
(_Apis mellifica_), and also the yellow-striped Italian Bee (_Apis
ligustica_), which belong to the same order (_Hymenoptera_) as the
Ichneumon Flies, and the same marvellous sense of life appreciating
life at a distance, and through solid matter, is experienced.

If we now follow the same Thought by examining the Inorganic, we make
the extraordinary discovery that this power to influence, based on
sympathetic action, is the very mainspring by which physical work can
be sustained, and upon it depends entirely the very action of our
physical senses. Our senses are based upon the appreciation of
Vibration, in the Air and Ether, of greater or less rapidity,
according to the presence in our organs of processes capable of acting
in sympathy with those frequencies. The limits within which our senses
can thus be affected are very small; the ear can only appreciate
thirteen or fourteen octaves in sound, and the eye less than one
octave in light; beyond these limits, owing to the absence of
processes which can be affected sympathetically, all is silent and
dark to us. This capacity for responding to vibration under
sympathetic action is not confined to Organi