APPENDIX. 729 



patterns which have once been in vogue in such trades are often 

 very persistent. 



Strong evidence of the literary and historical kind (q. v.) is 

 brought forward by Mr. J. Thrupp, in his interesting article on 

 the 'Domestication of Animals in England' (Trans. Ethn. Soc. 

 London, 1865, New Series, vol. iv. p. 169), in favour of the con- 

 clusion that 'in the sixth and seventh centuries bees were alto- 

 gether wild ' in this country. The history of the words used for 

 * hive ' appears to show that the first step towards the domestication 

 of the bee by the English was ' the formation of imitations in bark 

 (rnsca, see Ducange, sub voc.) of the hollows of the trees in which 

 they were found.' About the middle of the tenth century we read 

 of Anglo-Saxon ' beo-churls ; ' and we find 'the Anglo-Saxon word 

 "beo-cist" (bee-chest) and the Latin "alvearia" (bee-hives) usually 

 substituted for " rusca," from which it may be inferred that these 

 rough constructions were superseded by regular hives.' 



Hehn (Cultur-Planzen und Hausthiere, p. 425 ed. i. p. 505 

 ed. ii), referring to an c erschopfend ' article by Pott in Kuhn 

 and Schleicher's Beitrage, ii. 265, in which the Slavonic word for 

 hive is stated to be ulei and the Lithuanian awilys (as according to 

 Grimm (1819) the Bohemian word is aul and the Polish nl), sug- 

 gests that these words may be loan words modelled from the Latin 

 alveus, and mediaeval Latin apile. The Welsh scholars in Oxford, 

 the late Principal of Jesus College and Professor Rhys, inform me 

 that the common Welsh word for beehive is cwcli-gwenyn, literally 

 boat of bees, and that these are not loan words. If the words are 

 not borrowed words, the idea which they express is borrowed, and 

 shows that the employers of the metaphor used boats before hives. 

 If the boats to which they compared the beehives were the North 

 Welsh coracles with 'subspheroidal' rather than so-called ( scaphoid' 

 outlines, this may further indicate that the earliest form of beehive 

 with which the Welsh were acquainted was one which was late to 

 be attained to in the development of the invention 1 . If we are right 

 in holding, on the authority of Logan, I. c., that the Cornish word 

 for hive is Tcauelh, which in Welsh means a large basket, this would 

 go some way to show that the Cornish were not acquainted with, 

 or at least did not adopt the hive until it had been developed beyond 



1 I learn from Professor Westwood that according to Spinola our domestic species 

 Apis mellifica rarely occurs in Liguria ; and he suggests that this shows either that 

 the Ligures were not the colonisers of Wales, as has been affirmed, or that they did 

 not bring their bee Apis ligustica with them. 



