AMERICAN QUARTERLY MICROSCOPICAL JOURNAL. Edited by ROMYN HITCHCOCK. Devoted to the Interests of Microscopical Study in all Branches of Science. WITH WHICH IS ALSO PUBLISHED THE TRANSACTIONS OF THE NEW YORK MICROSCOPICAL SOCIETY. VOLUME I. PUBLISHED BY HITCHCOCK & WALL, 150 NASSAU STREET, NEW YORK. THE Honey Bee, Apis millifica, has been known from the remotest antiquity, and no other insect has been the subject of more careful study to the naturalist. Its wonderful intelligence and remarkable habits of forming colonies and working in communities, whose united labors are rendered subservient to man in the production of a luxurious food; its curious anatomical structure, and the exact adaptation of all parts of the body to its habits of life and the nature of the work to be performed, have, from time immemorial, rendered this insect and its habits not only a subject of general interest, but of special study and investigation. In this view, perhaps no less promising subject could be chosen for original investigation, and yet, if we place in the field of a microscope of very moderate amplification, a well dissected sting of one of these insects, we shall see before us a piece of mechanism which our naturalists have either imperfectly understood, or else the records of their knowledge are so concealed in voluminous reports of scientific societies as to be practically inaccessible to the amateur microscopist. It is true that we have in most of our books that treat of microscopic objects, such as the works of Carpenter, Hogg, Gosse, Micrographic Dictionary, etc., as well as the better class of entomological works, a general description of the principal pieces of this mechanism, and if we go to the head waters and consult the more elaborate writings of such original investigators of insect anatomy, as Burmeister, Westwood,* and numerous * Westwood's Introduction to the Study of Insects. 1840. |