Oct.,1915 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entouiological Society 73 



by the serpent to Eve was a sweet apple. The most ancient Veda 

 is one series of prayer to the two great Gods to accept the offered 

 libations of Soma juice. This was expressed from the stem of 

 a herb and when drunk produced great exhilaration of mind. 

 In other words the garden of Eden among all peoples was lost 

 by indulgence in alcoholic drink. Modern scholars have at- 

 tempted to identify the soma with the juice of a milkweed, 

 Asclepias acida. There are ten thousand lines of verse devoted 

 to the single remark that the devotee hopes the God will distend 

 his stomach to contain more of the excitant drink. One wonders 

 why it is no longer made. 



If the Tartar phrase, " sweeter than honey " is not a later in- 

 terpolation or mistranslation, it would indicate that the honey bee 

 was known to Turan before, at least, Persian Iran. The insect, 

 not mentioned in the Avesta, was a domesticated animal in China 

 from the earliest known time. The Scythians, a Turanic race 

 who were at the mouth of the Danube as early as 1500 B. C., 

 oldest people in the world. Their diet, says Herodotus, was milk 

 and honey. There had arisen a doubt in Egypt whether the 

 Egyptians were, as they had believed, the oldest people. The 

 Egyptians argued that life teems at the equator, secondly their 

 rich soil could support humanity, while the barren hillsides could 

 not. To this the upland Phrygians, Scythian race, replied that if 

 the land rose out of the sea, they on the mountains were certainly 

 older than the Nile dwellers on alluvial mud only a few feet above 

 sea level. Then, again, if the earth was once a molten mass and 

 had cooled for ages to the point of supporting life, the cold lands 

 of Scythia must be far older and prior in development of organic 

 life. The Phrygians seem to have had the better of the argu- 

 ment. Psammaticus, Pharaoh of Egypt, capitulated and acknowl- 

 edged Turan as the older land. The honey bee was domesticated 

 in Turan and a drink sweeter than honey started Turan on a 

 world migration. 



