THE SO-CALLED BUGONIA OF THE ANCIENTS. 495 



belief in literature is tbiiiul in the story of Samson [Judges, xiv, <S), of 

 wbicli I have already spoken in the j)aragraph about Swammerdam. 

 In the vineyards of Tininah Samson had killed a lion, and, ''after 

 awhile," on his way to fetch his bride, "he turned aside to see the car- 

 cass of the lion: and behold, there was a swarm of l)ees in the body 

 of the lion, andlioney; and he took it into his hands, and went on, 

 eating as he went,'' etc. As soon as a myth is started it begins to 

 grow. The seeing of a swarm of bee-like flies was a fact; the finding 

 and eating the honey was the myth grown out of the misconceived 

 fact. The riddle, which Samson proposes afterwards, affords the 

 proof of another fact: that the belief in the Buf/oni<( was current 

 among the people at that time; because, without that substratum, the 

 riddle would not have had any meaning: 



Out of the eater camo forth meat 



Aud oat of the strong came forth sweetness. 



The narrator of the tale arranges it so as to make it a preamble to 

 the riddle : When Samson gave the honey to his parents he did not 

 tell them that he had taken it from the body of the lion; because if he 

 told them, they (as believers in the Bugonia) would have solved the 

 riddle immediately, without the necessity of guessing. The story, 

 therefore, represents a real occurrence, based upon a well-observed but 

 wrongly interpreted natural phenomenon. 



It is curious to notice how Samuel Boshart (vol. ii, p. 502) comments 

 on this passage of the Book of Judges in order to meet possible objec- 

 tions. He admits that bees, besides their natural origin in hives, are 

 produced from dead oxen, in conformity to the opinion of numerous 

 ancient authors; but he scoffs at the ignorance of those who, relying 

 on the scriptural text, admit two kinds of animal-bred bees, and attacks 

 especially Moufet on that matter: " ISTec audiendus Mufetus Anglus qui 

 in Insectorum Theatro, alias apes scribit esse lepntogenes, alias tauro- 

 genes.'''' In order to explain the appearance of bees in Samson's lion, 

 Bochait establishes three propositions: 



( 1) Although it is stated in the text that the bees were in the carcass, 

 it is not stated that they were horn there (" apes in leonis corpore fuisse 

 rei^ertas, non tamen ibi natas''). 



(2) That between the killing of the lion and the finding of his 

 remains a whole year had elapsed, because the expression " after a 

 while" {post diem) in Hebrew must be understood to mean a whole 

 year. A host of authorities are adduced by Bochart to sustain this 

 strange proposition. 



(3) That at the end of a year the corpse was reduced to the state of 

 a clean skeleton, in which the bees could take shelter without repug- 

 nance, the bees being clean animals. 



But Bochart does not explain how those cleanly bees which could 

 not stand a rotten lion, could be born from rotten oxen. 



