726 APPENDIX. 



come to see that this at first sight trifling matter would, if we 

 could transport ourselves back into the days of even Caractacus, 

 constitute for us as constantly felt a difference between ancient and 

 modern life as would the absence or extreme rarity of glass and coal. 

 The only evidence which I have met with which may seem to show 

 that the British in pre-Roman times obtained the honey which the 

 authority I am about to quote calls an ' excellent succedaneum ' for 

 sugar, from hived bees rather than Trerprjs e/c yAa$i'/or}? of the Iliad 

 (/3. 88), the 'stony rock' of Scripture 1 , or the mountain oak of 

 Hesiod's Works and Days, 230, is the following passage in 

 Mr. Logan's ' Scottish Gael,' ii. 147. ' The Celtic Britons,' says 

 this authority, ' kept their bees in a bascaud formed of willow plaited. 

 About fifty years ago one of these was found in Lanishaw Moss ; 

 and about eighteen years since another was discovered about six feet 

 underground in Chat's Moss, both in Lancashire. This last was a 

 cone of about two yards and a half high and one yard in diameter at 

 bottom, and was divided into four floors or separate hives/ No 

 references are given in loco, and I have .not been able to find any 

 more detailed account of this discovery elsewhere. The older edi- 

 tions of Sir Charles Lyell's ' Principles of Geology,' e. g. ninth 

 edition, 1853, chap. xlv. p. 721, familiarised us with the belief that 

 Roman roads were to be found in Yorkshire and Kincardineshire 

 covered under peat of eight feet in thickness; but in his tenth 

 edition of 1868, vol. ii. chap. xliv. p. 499, as also in his 'Antiquity 

 of Man,' 1863, p. 110, we find some distrust expressed upon this 

 point, and in the last cited work the author inclines to accept 

 M. Boucher de Perthes' estimate of three centimetres being the 



1 I have not been able to convince myself that there is any allusion in either the 

 Old Testament or the Homeric poems to the invention of the hive any more than there 

 is to the common fowl. The earliest mention of hives which I have met with is in 

 Hesiod (fl. 700 B. c.), who in five lines of the Theogonia, 594-598, speaks of them 

 twice, once in the words ff^rjvefffft KaTTjpetpleffffi, and again as firrjpecpfas fflft&\ov*. 

 An eminent scholar has however suggested to me that hives seem to be referred to in 

 the words from the description of the cave in Ithaca (Odyssey, v. xiii. 106) : 



%v6a 8' eireiTa TiOat/Swo'aovai p.t\iaaai. 



But nothing that I can find recorded of the habits of wild bees is inconsistent with 

 what we can see of the fearlessness with which swarms of our bees will enter places 

 tenanted by man. As regards the force of the words, I find that Virgil in his para- 

 phrase of the passage jEneid, i. 159 seqq., as also Quintus Calaber in his vi. 470, omit 

 to give any equivalent whatever for them, whence perhaps we may infer that they 

 were not quite certain what they meant. Mr. Worsley however, in his translation of 

 them, gives us the simple words, ' Wild bees make honey there/ The two passages 

 in the Iliad, j9. ii. 87-89, ft. xii. 167, obviously refer to wild bees; and I submit that 

 Quintus Calaber in his line iii. 222, ai pa 6" tov irtpt aip,&\ov dirc-ipefftai TroTovrai > as well 

 as elsewhere, was guilty of an anachronism. 



