There is no more valuable chapter in Swammerdam's great work, the _Biblia Naturæ_, or Book of Nature, than that devoted to the hive-bee. This insect had long been a favourite study, but only those who were armed with a microscope and skilled in minute anatomy could solve the many difficult questions with which it was involved. Aristotle and other ancient naturalists had spoken of the _king_ of the bees, which some bee-masters of the seventeenth century had been inclined to call the queen. Was it really true that the queen was a female, perhaps the only female in the hive? This question Swammerdam decided by the clearest anatomical proof—viz., by dissecting out her ovaries. He pointed out the resemblances between the queen and the workers, such as the possession of a sting by both, but did not discover the reduced reproductive organs of the workers, and wrongly declared that they never lay eggs. He proved by elaborate dissections that the drones are the males of the community. How and when the queen is fertilised he could not make out.
[Illustration: MARCELLO MALPIGHI From an engraving of the oil-painting by A. M. Tobar, presented to the Royal Society by Malpighi.]
The dissection of the sting, the proboscis, and the compound eye of the bee was a task after Swammerdam's own heart, but so intricate that all his patience and skill could not save him from occasional slips. He bequeathed to his successors many noble examples of the way in which life-histories ought to be investigated.
Malpighi of Bologna may be called the first of the histologists, for as early as the second half of the seventeenth century he unravelled the tissues of many animals and plants. His work on plant-tissues was so closely accompanied by the similar researches of an Englishman, Nehemiah Grew, that it is not easy to assign the priority to either. Malpighi was the first to demonstrate the capillaries which connect the arteries with the veins, the first to investigate the glands of the human body and the sensory papillæ of the skin. At the request of our Royal Society he drew up an account of the structure and life-history of the silkworm, which is memorable as the earliest anatomical study of any insect. Malpighi also applied his microscope to the chick-embryo, and figured its chief stages. His exposition of the formation of the heart and vessels of the chick is a marvellous example of the quick appreciation of novel structures.