490 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[No. 295. 



instance to withdraw her sting. This very fine 

 and delicate apparatus is barbed at the end ; and 

 therefore, being firmly fixed below, by contraction 

 draws the rest of the sheath after it. 



And now, having probably satisfied himself 

 with the experiment of the sting, F. would with 

 the finger and thumb of his right hand pull it out 

 (injecting by the pressure in laying hold of it any 

 particle of poison that still remained in the bag), 

 and turn to the bee itself. This he would trace to 

 the ground, or some low shrub close by ; still 

 alive, to be sure, but no longer the active, cheerful, 

 and noisy little creature it was a minute ago. If he 

 throw it into the aii", it will not fly off; if he place 

 it at the mouth of its own hive, it will not enter 

 itself, nor be assisted by its friends ; if he forcibly 

 throw it in, it will immediately crawl out ; if he 

 does, as I have also done, return it into the hive by 

 an opening at the top, or under a glass where its 

 motions can be watched, it will slowly wend its 

 mournful way through the midst of the busy com- 

 munity to the entrance, unheeding and unheeded 

 — as if conscious that the best public service to 

 which it could apply its little remaining strength, 

 was to act the part of undertaker to itself, and 

 secure an extra-mural grave, rather than trespass 

 after death on the time, strength, and feelings of 

 any of the busy members of the community who 

 would be called on to conduct its funeral obsequies. 

 The fact is, that the sting, with its appurte- 

 nances, is so large in proportion to the whole body, 

 and the detaching it from the other parts must so 

 seriously disturb the internal economy of the in- 

 sect, that the wonder seems to be that it retains 

 any animation at all after losing it. I never suc- 

 ceeded but once in getting a bee to extricate its 

 sting, and that was when she seemed to have re- 

 pented of the act almost before she put it into 

 force, and had hardly penetrated the skin. I have 

 however succeeded in cutting off the end of the 

 sting with a pair of scissors, or penknife, before 

 the poison-bag has become detached ; and then 

 the bee has invariably seemed to retain her vigour, 

 and return to her duties a more harmless but 

 equally active member of society. 



I will add, that so convinced are apiarians in 

 general of the fact that bees die as a consequence 

 of losing their stings, which they always do if they 

 insert them into flesh, or material of its con- 

 sistency, that those who value the lives of their 

 little workwomen, when engaged with them, use 

 thick woollen gloves and dresses, into which they 

 can sting without inflicting injury ; and whence 

 they can extract their stings with perfect ease- 

 Much more I could write, but already I have 

 trespassed too much on your space in endeavour- 

 ing to defend the peculiarly apt illustration in the 

 quotation cited by your correspondent. 



J. D. Ottinge. 



NAMES OF CAT AND BOG. 



(Vol. X., p. 50r. ; Vol. xi., p. 429.) 



The merit of ingenuity does not belong to me, 

 but appertains to Adrien Balbi, who, in his Intro- 

 duction to the Ethnographic Atlax, first communi- 

 cated the fact as a general rule, not, of course, 

 without exceptions, that whilst the name of the 

 dog varied with every distinct people, that of the 

 cat was identical nearly in all languages. This 

 work I have not seen for twenty years, but it is in 

 the British Museum, where E. C. H. may consult 

 it, and where he will find that Balbi, after investi- 

 gating about three thousand languages, was in the 

 best possible position to deduce a law of compa- 

 rative philology, which is denied to those who can 

 only investigate thirty or forty languages. Ex- 

 ceptions much more numerous than those (if such) 

 cited by your correspondent may be adduced, but 

 in this case exceptio prohat regulam. 



The interesting question of the origin of the 

 Persian would occupy too much of your space to 

 discuss here. I may observe, however, that Sir 

 Wm. Jones is not now the best authority on that 

 subject. A modern authority (I quote from 

 Kaitschmidt's German translation of Eichhoff"'3 

 Parallele des Langues, p. 23.) says, — 



" The original tj'pe of the Persian family is the Zend,, 

 the sacred lancfuage of the Magi and Zoroaster, which 

 sprung from the same stock as the Sanscrit. The Zend 

 was spoken by the ancient Persians, as was also the 

 Pehlvi, another tongue mixed with Chaldee, spoken by 

 the Medes and Parthians. Zend was written in the cunei- 

 form character before it possessed a separate alphabet. At 

 the beginning of our era the Parsi took the place of the 

 Zend, a dialect of the same family, and became the pre- 

 vailing language of the whole kingdom under the Sas- 

 sanides. This language remained unchanged till the 

 invasion of the Mahometans, who, mingling the Arabic 

 therewith, produced the present Persian, which language, 

 in reference to its double origin, stands in relation to the 

 Zend as the English does to the German." 



The name of the cat is perhaps not now to be 

 found in the long-extinct Zend and Basque lan- 

 guages ; but assuming with Balbi the root gat, or 

 cat, to be the almost universal name, I have found 

 a significant root in the Zend which I had not met 

 with elsewhere. The relation of the cat to the 

 other feline tribes, so evident from a consideration 

 of its structure and habits, naturally draws the 

 inquirer to those countries where the feline race 

 exists in its greatest perfection ; and observing 

 the Persian cat to be the best developed of its 

 kind, I was glad to find a confirmation in philo- 

 logy, whence, if correct, a chronology of the in- 

 troduction of the species into Europe might be 

 deduced. 



The Egyptian cat, as depicted on the monu- 

 ments, is the Felis maniculata (see the figure in 

 the Penny Cycl., art. Felis, p. 222.), evidently a 

 different species from our domestic. It is quite 



