76 THE ESSEX NATURALIST.
not only less expensive to buy, but more easy to employ and
more satisfactory to use than any varnish prepared from natural
resins: as a result the exploitation of natural resins is faced
with extinction. An important sequel of this particular change
has been the adoption by the synthetic chemist of a new guiding
principle. His ambition to supply at a cheaper rate synthetic
products identical in composition and properties with natural
products, has now been replaced by a determination to provide
Human Society with synthetic substances superior, as regards
their qualities, to anything produced by Nature. Already this
new principle has been widely and successfully applied in the
therapeutic field and its extension to the industrial field inspires
in synthetic chemistry the wish to provide Human Society with
better sealing-wax and better gramophone records than the
Coccus now does. Human Society looks with indifference upon
the struggle now in progress between the respective champions
of beet and cane as sources of sugar—a struggle as bitter as that
which took place in Renaissance days between the respective
champions of indigo and Woad as sources of a popular and
valuable blue dye. Biology is disposed to ask whether, in view
of this struggle, the keeping of bees be more than an archaic
survival of classical Husbandry, but refrains from asking the
question because, in one important particular, the ways of
Human Fashion resemble those of Providence, and because
Prejudice shares with Necessity the quality of "knowing no Law."
Yet, now and again, the unexpected is met with. The substance
we know as "artificial silk," invented less with the object of
saving the lives of silk-worms than with that of destroying the
livelihood of rearers of the worm and weavers of silk, cannot yet
be offered in a non-creasable form without the addition of a
certain minimum of silk waste. The silk-worm, therefore, still
meets its end with resignation, and the silk manufacturer is still
able to make ends meet. This latter circumstance may have
something to do with the anxiety makers of "artificial silk"
display that their product be spoken of as "rayon."
Evidence that the abandonment of faithful friends is a
characteristic feature of Human Society is not confined to
insect and plant witnesses. Raptorial birds, once the pampered
slaves of Mediaeval European falconers, have, except in a few
remote Central Asian valleys, been deprived of their old status