4 BRITISH BEES. 



To this remote period, possibly not so early as the 

 discovery of the treasures of the bee, may be assigned 

 also the first domestication of the animals useful to man, 

 many of which are still found in those districts in all 

 their primitive wildness. The discovery and cultivation 

 of the cereal plants will also date from this early age. 

 The domestication of animals has never been satisfac- 

 torily explained, but all inquiry seems to point to those 

 regions as the native land, both of them, and of the 

 graminea, which produce our grain ; for Heinzelmann, 

 Linnseus's enthusiastic disciple, found there those 

 grasses still growing wild, which have not been found 

 elsewhere in a natural state. 



Thus, long before the three great branches of the 

 human race, the Aryan, Shemitic, and Turonian, took 

 their divergent courses from the procreative nest which 

 was to populate the earth, and which Max Miiller pro- 

 poses to call the Rhematic period, they were already 

 endowed from their patrimony with the best gifts nature 

 could present to them; and they were thus fitted, in their 

 estrangement from their home, with the requirements, 

 which the vicissitudes they might have to contend with 

 in their migrations, most needed. They would even- 

 tually have settled into varying conditions, differently 

 modified by time acting conjunctively with climate and 

 position, until, in the lapse of years, and the changes 

 the earth has since undergone, the stamp impressed by 

 these causes, which would have been originally evan- 

 escent, became indelible. That but one language was 

 originally theirs, the researches of philology distinctly 

 prove, by finding a language still more ancient than its 

 Aryan, Shemitic, and Turonian derivatives. From this 

 elder language these all spring, their common origin 



