and baked it in pans, and for forty years lived almost entirely upon it. St. Paul styles this food "spiritual meat;" David calls it "angel's food;" and Nehemiah and St. John give it the appellation of "bread from heaven."

Burckhardt says that the Bedouins collect manna on Mount Djebel-Serbal, under the same circumstances described by Moses. He states that when the rain has been abundant during the winter, it drops from the tamarisk-tree, common in the deserts of Syria and Arabia, and in the valley of Ghor, near the Red Sea; but he is not aware that this tree produces manna anywhere else.

Pliny mentions a mountain in Crete where bees were never found, and which, nevertheless, produced a considerable quantity of honey. It is probable, however, that both Galen and Pliny may allude to what is familiarly called honey-dew, which, in certain climates and under particular states of the atmosphere, may assume a consistence not observed in other countries. In particular seasons there appears a species of manna on the leaves of trees in California, this juice exuding from them like gum.

The culture of bees was in much repute in Attica, and fresh honey from the hive is still in great request at Athens. The fine quality of that produced on Mount Hymettus is derived from two species of savory. The peasants carry their bees in cane baskets up the hill in summer and back to the valleys in winter. They divide their hives in the spring, but do not permit the bees to swarm of themselves. Solon enacted a law that every man's stook should be kept at a distance of not less than 300 feet from that of his neighbour's; and that the penalty for poisoning a hive was extremely severe among the Romans, we learn from the result of a trial, in which Quintilian accused a rich man of poisoning a poor man's bees with certain venomous flowers that grew in his garden.

Ancient husbandmen frequently transported their bees from field to field for a more abundant supply of flowers, especially in autumn. The Greeks

moved their hives every year from Achaia to Attica; and there is a wandering tribe, inhabiting the declivities of the Caucasus, who take their hives with them wherever they go; the natives of Juliers, in Westphalia, also change the locality of their bees according to the season. In some parts of France and Piedmont there are floating apiaries of a hundred hives; and similar republics once existed upon the Nile.

The honey of the Brazils is chiefly used as a medicine. The bees are small and black, and their sting comparatively painless. They deposite their wealth in the hollows of trees, which are frequently cut down for the sole purpose of getting the honey.

In Caubul bees are particularly attached to the sweet-scented yellow flowers of the bedee mishk. In the province of Pensa, in Russia, they fly with the utmost eagerness to the blossoms of the linden-tree, from which they form honey of a greenish colour and of a delicious flavour. But the flower which affords the richest liquid is the nyctanthes (Arabian jasmine). The Hindus believe that the bees sleep upon its blossoms during the night, to which Moore alludes when describing the sounds of falling wa

ters:

"Lulling as the song

Of Indian bees at sunset, when they throng
Around the fragrant Nilica, and deep

In its blue blossoms hum themselves to sleep.

The Guadaloupe bees deposite their honey in bladders of wax, about as large as a pigeon's egg, and not in combs. They have no stings, are small, and of a black colour, producing honey of an oily consistence, that never hardens. The bees of Guadalaxara, in the same manner, have no stings, and thence derive the name of angelitos, "little angels." N

In Samar the hives hang in the form of oblong gourds from the branches of trees, and in South Africa they are suspended from the edges of rocks. These nests the Hottentots discover by following the flight of a little brown bird called the indicator, which, on finding one, flies in quest of some person to whom it may impart its secret, which it does by whistling and flying from anthill to anthill, till it arrives at the spot where the hive is. There it stops and is silent! The Hottentot then takes the greater part of the honey, and the bird feasts upon the remainder.

The best honey in Persia is collected from the orange-groves of Kauzeroon, while that of Kircagah, near Pergamos, is the best in Anatolia, being obtained from the flower of the cotton plant that grows there it is of a snowy-white colour. The white honey of Lebadeæ is sent regularly to Constantinople, for the use of the grand seignior and the ladies of his seraglio.

Bees are very prolific in the Uralian Forest, but there are none in Siberia. The Scotch colonists at Karres, in the Caucasus, have upward of 500 hives. The honey here is said to have a fragrant smell and a most agreeable flavour. Its colour is a mixture of green and yellow. That of Guriel is nearly as hard as sugar, and partakes of that intoxicating quality to which Xenophon alludes in his History of the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. The same quality has been remarked in the honey of Paraguay, and in that produced on the borders of the Ganges. Some honey, as we learn from Wedelus's Dissertation on Nectar and Ambrosia, was called Ambrosia, while the "pure virgin" honey received the appellation of Nectar; and hence Linnæus called the repository in flowers the nectarium. The flavour of honey depends more on the kind of flowers on which the bees feed than on the insects themselves. Hence the fine flavour of the honey of

Derne, in the Tripolitan States, which is derived from the yellow blossoms of a plant that blows during the principal part of the year.

The uses of honey are various and important. The Susans were accustomed to comb their purple wool with it, to preserve its beauty and freshness. The Greeks had a drink, called hydromel, which consisted of water and honey boiled together, and in which was infused a little old wine. Among the ancient Britons, mead (metheglin) was the principal, if not the sole drink of luxury. In the court of Hoel Dha, the mead-maker took precedence of the physician. In Ireland they have a drink made of honey and mulberries, which they call morat.

The Spartans and Assyrians employed honey for preserving the dead from putrefaction. Hence the wish of Democritus that he might be buried in honey. The body of Alexander was embalmed in that liquid, after which it was placed in a coffin of gold enclosed in a sarcophagus.

Honey was frequently used by the ancients upon their altars, and in the ceremony of the Inferiæ it was poured upon the tombs of virgins. Iphigenia, in Euripides, promises to pour upon the funeral flame of Orestes,

"The flower-drawn nectar of the mountain bee."

In the Persians of Eschylus, too, Atopa prepares to pour, as libations over the tomb of his father,

"Delicious milk, that foams

White from the sacred heifer; liquid honey,
Extract of flowers; and from its virgin fount
The running crystal."

Hence honey was considered an emblem of death: notwithstanding which, it was supposed to be the principal food in the golden age of the poets. It was used, too, in the burnt-offerings of the Persians; but it was expressly forbidden by the Levitical law.

In medicine honey is esteemed a purgative and aperient, while it promotes expectoration and dissolves glutinous juices. The wax is employed externally in unguents, and internally in diarrhoeas and dysenteries, combined with oily substances. In fact, honey was once so much esteemed that Horace frequently mixed it with his Falernian, declaring that, of all medicines for the stomach, this was the best. Epaminondas seldom took anything but bread and honey. The Bedas of Ceylon season their meat with it. Many of the disciples of Pythagoras lived almost entirely upon it; also the modern Tartars; and Augustus, one day inquiring of an old man, who had attained the age of a hundred, how he had arrived at so great an age, with a body so vigorous and a mind so sound, the veteran replied that it was 'by oil without and honey within.” The same is reported of Democritus.

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The Romans considered bees, in general, as favourable omens; but if a swarm chanced to light on a temple, it was looked upon as indicative of some great misfortune. This is alluded to by Juvenal; and Livy records an instance, also, in which they were supposed to predict calamity.

The peasants of Wales, and, indeed, of most countries, are extremely cautious of offending their bees; believing, if they do so, that some ill fortune will attend them. Some have even gone so far as to imagine that bees possess a portion of the Divine mind a belief so ancient that Virgil alludes to it. Others, however, have carried their superstition only to the length of allowing them a certain sacredness of character. Monarchs have respected them. Thus bees were wrought into the coronation robes of Charlemagne. Pope Urban VIII., too, chose three bees for his armorial bearings.

Bees have many enemies besides man. There is, among these, an animal inhabiting part of Africa, near the Cape, which, though endued with a body