730 APPENDIX. . 



the stage of ' rusca,' ' corticibus suta cavatis,' into that of the 

 'lento alvearia vimine texta' of Virgil. I have, finally, the authority 

 of Professor Rhys for the possibility of the Welsh word for wax, 

 viz. cwyr, being a loan word from the Latin. 



I searched, as I had expected, in vain, for any figure of a hive in 

 Mr. Evans's 1 ' Coins of the Ancient Britons,' 1864. 



The currently, and as I believe correctly, accepted view that the 

 common fowl, Gallus gallinaceus, is never mentioned by, and may with 

 some considerable likelihood be supposed to have been unknown to the 

 Old Testament writers and to Homer and Hesiod also, is confirmed 

 by the negative evidence of the neolithic interments in this country 2 . 



1 In answer to an enquiry of mine as to the existence of a figure of a hive on any 

 ancient coin whatever, Mr. Evans informs me that he does not know of any such coin 

 which has certainly a hive upon it. The figures upon two coins of Dyrrachium given 

 by Beger (Thesaur. Brandenberg. Select, vol. i. p. 459) and by Goltz (ed. Nonnius, 1620, 

 pi. i. fig. 7, p. 4) amongst the coins of Greece, the Islands, and Asia Minor, though 

 described loco. citt. as ' apiaria ' and ' alvearia,' Mr. Evans thinks may be merely the 

 caps of the Dioscuri. And to me these figures, as given in the latter of the books 

 referred to, appear with their pendent strings to suggest the mitres with redimicula 

 of the jEneid, ix. 616, rather than the alvearia of the Georgics. 



Professor Westwood has furnished me with certain references from hagiological 

 literature which bear on the question of the recent date of the domestication of the 

 bee in these islands. In the Life of St. Cadoc (Bibl. Cotton. Vesp. A. xiv) it is stated 

 that he chose a solitary place for his monastery, having seen aprum sub arbor e jacentem, 

 apes venientes et intrantes in cavam arborem. In the first Life of St. David we are 

 told that his father was told by an angel that he would find gifts by the river Teivy ; 

 a certain stag ; apumque examen in arbore positum, &c. And in the second Life of 

 the same saint there is a curious legend of a swarm of bees settling on a ship going to 

 Ireland, the bees following St. David from place to place ; and it is added that 'Hibernia 

 in qua nunquam usque ad illud tempus apes vivere poterant mellis fertilitate ditatur.' 

 See also Lanigan, Eccl. Hist., iii. 82-84; Life of St. Molaga, cap. 22; Notes on Irish 

 Architecture, by the Earl of Dunraven, i. pp. 63, 64. 



2 It is a little difficult to reconcile the passages which stand in our authorised version 

 of the Old Testament (1 Kings x. 22 ; 2 Chron. ix. 21), to the effect that a navy of 

 Tarshish brought 'once in three years gold and silver, ivory, and apes and peacocks ' 

 to king Solomon, with the view held, I should suppose, by most modern Hebraists, as 

 by Bochart (Hierozoicon, ed. 1682, lib. i. cap. xvi. p. Ill), that when the Latin * inter- 

 pretes multa prophetarum loca ad gallinaceum genus referunt/ it is, in the words of 

 the writer just cited, conjecturis non satis certis. For the servants of Hiram and 

 Solomon would have found it at least as easy and profitable to import Q-allus banJciva 

 and indeed Sus indicus as apes and peacocks. But as against this utilitarian considera- 

 tion we may suggest that the words of Caesar quoted in the text render it not wholly 

 improbable that to the Tyrian sailors the fowl may have been a forbidden food, as it 

 was to many other races ; and as, in fact, Sus was to their Hebrew comrades on those 

 ships of Tarshish. Antiquaries who hold that it was from intercourse with Phrenician 

 rather than with Etruscan traders that the Britons learnt certain other things will 

 think this an argument in their favour. A long sea-voyage however, as the absence 

 of the fowl from New Zealand in the time of Captain Cook shows us, made the intro- 

 duction of domestic animals very difficult to such navigators. And the history of the 

 words makes me suspect that it was by the way of Babylon rather than that of the 

 Red Sea that the peacock itself, to say nothing of the common fowl, the rrepaiKos opvis, 

 found its main route of immigration into Palestine and Greece. For, during the 



