perceive the direction of the
weapon, whether perpendicular and favourable to my plans, or slanting
and therefore valueless. Those are the advantages.

The disadvantages are these: the amputated abdomen, though more
tractable than the entire Bee, is still far from satisfying my wishes.
It gives capricious starts and unexpected pricks. I want it to sting
here. No, it balks my forceps and goes and stings elsewhere: not very
far away, I admit; but it takes so little to miss the nerve-centre which
we wish to get at. I want it to go in perpendicularly. No, in the
great majority of cases it enters obliquely and passes only through the
epidermis. This is enough to show how many failures are needed to make
one success.

Nor is this all. I shall be telling nobody anything new when I recall
the fact that the Bee's sting is very painful. That of the hunting
insects, on the contrary, is in most cases insignificant. My skin, which
is no less sensitive than another's, pays no attention to it: I handle
Sphex, Ammophilae and Scoliae without heeding their lancet-pricks. I
have said this before; I remind the reader of it because of the matter
in hand. In the absence of well-known chemical or other properties, we
have really but one means of comparing the two respective poisons; and
that is the amount of pain produced. All the rest is mystery. Besides,
no poison, not even that of the Rattlesnake, has hitherto revealed the
cause of its dread effects.

Acting, therefore, under the instruction of that one guide, pain, I
place the Bee's sting far above that of the predatory insects as an
offensive weapon. A single one of its thrusts must equal and often
surpass in efficaciousness the repeated wounds of the other. For all
these reasons--an excessive display of energy; the variable quantity of
the virus inoculated by a wriggling abdomen which no longer measures the
emission by doses; a sting which I cannot direct as I please; a wound
which may be deep or superficial, the weapon entering perpendicularly or
obliquely, touching the nerve-centres or affecting only the surrounding
tissues--my experiments ought to produce the most varied results.

I obtain, in fact, every possible kind of disorder: ataxy, temporary
disablement, permanent disablement, complete paralysis, partial
paralysis. Some of my stricken victims recover; others die after a brief
interval. It would be an unnecessary waste of space to record in this
volume my hundred and one a