328 APPENDIX. 



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 Lanis- 

 haw 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 refer- 

 ences are given in loco, and I have not been able to find any more 

 detailed account of this discovery elsewhere. The older editions 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. no, 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 rate of increment for every hundred years. The 

 following summary, however, of the facts known as to the growth of 

 peat, given by Professor McK. Hughes in a lecture delivered before the 

 Royal Institution, Friday, March 24, 1876, on 'Geological Measures of 

 Time ' (see ' Proceedings of the Royal Institution,' p. 6), will justify us 

 in setting aside the imperfectly recorded history given above from Mr. 

 Logan's work : — 



' He explained the growth of peat, pointing out that there are two 

 kinds of peat ; that which is formed in water, as in mountain tarns or 



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 cptrjveacri /caTTjpKpeeaci, and again as knr)p«peas aip.(i\ovs. 

 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, xiii. 106) : — 



€v9a 5' crrctra riOaifiwaoovoi /xiKiaaai. 

 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, iEneid, i. 159 seqq., as also Quintus Calaber in his vi. 470, omits 

 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, ii. 87-89, xii. 167, obviously refer to wild bees; and I submit that 

 Quintus Calaber in his line iii. 222, 01 pd 6' ebv irepl oip.fikov airupiaiai TroreovTai, as 

 well as elsewhere, was guilty of an anachronism. 



