. . .Nature, profoundly ignorant of our sniveling ideas of justice and equality, vastly pampers certain animal species, while showing herself harsh and indifferent to others; now the male is favoured, now the female, upon whom the greatest mass of superiorities is heaped, and upon whom likewise all the cruelties and disdains. The hymenoptera include bees, bumble-bees, wasps, scolies, ants, masons, sphex, bembex, osmies, etc. The place of these among insects is analogous to that of the primates or even of man among mammifers. But while woman, not animally inferior to her male, remains below him in nearly all intellectual activities, among the hymenoptera the female is both brain and the tool, the engineer, the working-staff, the mistress, mother, and nurse unless, as in the case of bees, she casts upon a third sex all duties not purely sexual. The males make love. The male of the tachyte, a sort of wasp rather like the sphex, is about eight times smaller than the female, but he. . . Read More