DISCOVERY 



233 



some honev in tlic commander's house, became in 

 half-an-hour so ifiddy that I thought of throwing 

 mvself down from the castle." ' The French botanist 

 and traveller Tournefort, in the eighteenth century, 

 was of course familiar with the classics, and discusses 

 the relevant passages in Xenophon, Plinv and 

 Dioscorides. He attributes the origin of the poisoned 

 honey to two different species of rhododendron, and 

 evidently in the case of one of them local popular 

 belief was with him ; for when he intended to present 

 a bouquet of its flowers to the pasha, in whose suite 

 he was travelling, he was informed that their perfume 

 caused headaches and was deleterious to the brain. " 



My friend and colleague. Professor McLean 

 Thompson, has been kind enough to give me some 

 information which, although perhaps familiar to 

 botanists, is evidently unknown to most readers and 

 to the commentators on Xenophon ; other persons, 

 who are as ignorant as myself in such matters, 

 may also find it interesting. Nothing, he tells 

 me, can be found in the flowering records which 

 can be used as evidence against any of the species of 

 plants, which are quoted by the various authorities, to 

 prove that they are naturally poisonous, nor is any- 

 thing known of the Black Sea littoral which provides 

 a basis for the idea that climate determined the 

 poi.sonous nature of the honey. There are, in fact. 

 no grounds for supposing that there is anything 

 poisonous in the honey itself provided that it is col- 

 lected normally by a nectar collecting insect. " But 

 honey is almost invariably a lost product, produced 

 in excess at a point in the flower where food materials 

 should be used in forming floral parts. The latter 

 fail to develop, the food materials are unused, and are 

 exuded on what are Ln a sense the graves of the 

 aborted parts. With this almost invariably there 

 goes the development of succulent deformed mounds 

 of tissue, replacing the perverted parts, and in these 

 parts there is abnormal physiology and frequently the 

 accumulation of by-products in which toxins abound. 

 Now- I can testify that in the cases you mention sur- 

 face collecting of nectar is the rule, and this involves 

 no risk of poisoning the nectar. But in seasons, 

 when the competition for nectar pollen is intense, 

 many insect types adopt a biting habit, piercing the 

 tissues of many plants of different type, in search of 

 short-cuts to food supply, while other types fail to 

 develop this new habit. I have never known the 

 nectar disc of Heracleum to be pierced and the 

 corolla alone of Azalea is pierced and does not con- 

 tain poison. Nevertheless, I have known many 

 insects not drunk but completely stupified after a 

 period of flower biting while collecting nectar. From 



' Von Hammer, Op. cit., II.. p. iiq. 



- Tournefort, Relation d'liii Vova^e dti Levant (Paris, 1717), 

 II., pp. 228 foil. 



this thev recover after periods of from 8 to 24 hours. 

 The inference is that in seasons when the biting- habit 

 is common, honey may be poisoned frequently by the 

 toxins of plants which have been bitten. Recently 

 (last vear) I knew- of so-called poisoned honey in 

 Liege in a season when the biting habit was very 

 common and on asking a beekeeper on the point, he 

 said that in 1893, a year al.so when the biting habit 

 was common, poisoned honey was known." 



This explanation, it will be noticed, solves Pliny's 

 problem, and confirms the accuracy of his observation 

 that the honey was poisonous in some seasons and 

 not in others. 



Galileo, the Roman 



Inquisition, and Modern 



Italian Philosophy 



By Thomas Okey, M.A. 



Professor of Italian in the Vnieersily of Cambridge 



A PLE.ASIXG trait in Italian life is the perennial interest 

 Italian citizens take in the spiritual, as well as the 

 patriotic, history of their countrv. The wealth of 

 literature w-hich this preoccupation with the things 

 of the mind brings to light is remarkable. No com- 

 munity, how-ever small, howe\-er remote from centres 

 of population, but which has its patient students. 

 Monographs of this nature abound, often produced at 

 the cost of the renunciation of the more material 

 agreements of life. As In the citizen, so in the State. 

 The new- Italy, limited as she is in financial resources, 

 reflects this care for the concerns of the mind. She 

 publishes the works of her thinkers and her artists In 

 monumental national editions, and Royal Commis- 

 sions have published Mazzini's, Da Vinci's, and 

 Galileo's works. The last, in twenty stately tomes, 

 together with a supplementary volume of documents 

 relating to Galileo's trial at Rome edited by the 

 director of the national edition — documents long 

 buried In the recesses of the Holy Office and in 

 the secret archives of the \'atican' — have enabled 

 Professor Gentile to include a collection of Galilean 

 Frammenti e letters in the publications of the 

 Bibliotcca di Chissici italiani.' By the aid of these 

 documents and Gentile's admirable notes and com- 

 ments it is possible to review the story as told In the 

 calm order of the legal procedure. 



If w-e may Imagine the svmbolic man-in-the-street 

 to be set before a paper, " Write what you know- of 

 Galileo," he would probably (If he answered at all) 



' Galileo e Vlnquisizione. Documenti. A. Favaro. Florence. 

 - R. Giusti. Leghorn. 



