The Life of the Bee
by whose side he seats himself, he who has guarded the hearth, be blind or very old. So long as the fire still burn that he has been watching, he has done as much as the best could have done. Well for us if we can transmit this ardour, not as we received it, but added to by ourselves; and nothing will add to it more than this hypothesis of evolution, which goads us to question with an ever severer method and ever increasing zeal all that exists on the earth’s surface and in its entrails, in the depths of the sea and expanse of the sky. Reject it, and what can we set up against it, what can we put in its place? There is but the grand confession of scientific ignorance, aware of its knowing nothing—but this is habitually sluggish, and calculated to discourage the curiosity more needful to man than wisdom—or the hypothesis of the fixity of the species and of divine creation, which is less demonstrable than
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