Later there were fortunate innovators, whose race supplanted the more conservative element, who discovered an inexhaustible source of nourishment, to be obtained without painful search or dangerous conflict: the saccharine exudation of the flowers.

The wasteful system of living upon prey, by no means favourable to large populations, has been preserved for the feeble larvae; but the vigorous adult has abandoned it for an easier and more prosperous existence.

Thus the Philanthus of our own days was gradually developed; thus was formed the double system of nourishment practised by the various predatory insects which we know.
The bee has done still better; from the moment of leaving the egg it dispenses completely with chance-won aliments.

It has invented honey, the food of its larvae.

Renouncing the chase for ever, and becoming exclusively agricultural, this insect has acquired a degree of moral and physical prosperity that the predatory species are far from sharing.
Hence the flourishing colonies of the Anthophorae, the Osmiae, the Eucerae, the Halicti, and other makers of honey, while the hunters of prey work in isolation; hence the societies in which the bee displays its admirable talents, the supreme expression of instinct.
This is what I should say if I were a "transformist." All this is a chain of highly logical deductions, and it hangs together with a certain air of reality, such as we like to look for in a host of "transformist" arguments which are put forward as irrefutable.