7 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



general failure, not only in America but in Europe. The modi- 

 cum of honey produced, especially of comb-honey, was soon ex- 

 hausted, and the dealers as well as consumers, North, South, East, 

 and West, were crying out for honey. The producers were inun- 

 dated with letters and orders which they could not fill. Now, here 

 was the grand opportunity for the manufacturers of "artificial 

 honey." If the article could be sold "at an immense profit at half 

 the price " of the genuine article, as Prof. Wiley assures us, these 

 bogus manufacturers could have coined money — there were " mill- 

 ions in it " apparently. But they failed to appear. The glucose 

 was available, the paraffin ditto, and the " appropriate machinery " 

 ought, in the interval under the law of progress, to have become 

 still more " appropriate " and perfect in its work ; but, strange to 

 say, the famine of honey continued. The tempting prices were 

 offered in vain. Not a pound of the stuff ever " materialized/' so 

 far as anybody could find out. Nor was this gap in the extracted 

 honey, caused by the drought, filled by any artificial substitute, 

 which also goes to prove that the prevalent notion that honey is 

 extensively adulterated has very little foundation in fact. Con- 

 sidering the comparatively low market prices of honey the past 

 few years, and the facility with which the genuine article can be 

 produced in modern scientific bee-culture, adulteration would 

 hardly pay for the trouble. 



That there is but very little adulteration either of comb or 

 extracted honey may be safely asserted. The prevalent popular 

 belief to the contrary may be accounted for in two ways — by the 

 prevalent ignorance of the character and what I might call the 

 habits of honey, and by the erroneous teachings and misleading 

 reports of the authorities under review. While it may be said, in 

 general terms, that honey chemically consists of sugar and water, 

 in the proportion usually of about seventy-five per cent of the 

 former to twenty-five of the latter,* these elements vary so much 

 in their proportions in different grades of honey gathered from so 

 many different flowers at different seasons of the year that there 

 is no sure test, chemical or other, of honey. Even the polari- 

 scope, but recently considered a certain test of its purity, and 

 still so considered by some analysts, is found to be uncertain and 

 unreliable. While generally in pure honey the ray of light is 

 turned to the left, some samples, equally pure, though perhaps 

 stored rapidly and capped prematurely, may contain so much 

 cane-sugar that the ray is turned to the right. Hence the mis- 

 takes of chemists, relying upon the integrity of the polariscope, 

 in passing up on the purity or impurity of honey. They have 



* According to C. Tomlinson, F. R. S., F. C. S., dextrose thirty-eight per cent, levulose 

 thirty-six, water twenty-two, and the remaining four, salts, wax, pollen, gluten, and aromatic 

 and coloring matters. 



