492 HONEY HANDLING. 
Uses or Honey. 
847. The traditions of the remotest antiquity show that 
honey has always been considered a pleasant and healthy 
food. For several thousand years, it was the only swect 
known. 
Now that the sap of the cane, or the beet, converted into 
sugar, has become a necessity in every family, let us see 
what place honey may occupy in our diet, not only asa 
condiment like sugar, but as food, drink, and medicine. 
As Food. 
Honey as food is very healthy. It is admitted that those 
who use honey freely at meal time, find in it health and 
long life. * 
“Tt is Nature’s offering to man—ready for use, distilled drop 
by drop in myriads of flowers, by a more delicate process than 
any human laboratory ever produced.”— (T.G. Newman, ‘‘ Honey 
as Food and Medicine.’’) 
*The following extract from the work of Sir J. More, London, 1707, will show 
the estimate which the old writers set upon bee-products: 
“«Natural wax is altered by distillation into an oyl of marvellous vertue; it 
is rather a Divine medicine than humane, because, in wounds or inward dis- 
eases, it worketh miracles. The bee helpeth to cure all your diseases, and is 
the best little friend a man has in the world...... Honey is of subtil parts, 
and therefore doth pierce as oyl, and easily passeth the parts of the body; it 
openeth obstructions, and cleareth the heart and lights of those humors which 
fall from the head; it purgeth the foulness of the body, cureth phlegmatick 
matter, and sharpeneth the stomach; it purgeth those things which hurt the 
clearness of the eyes, breedeth good blood, stirreth up natural heat, and pro- 
longeth life; it keepeth all things uncorrupt which are put into it, and is a 
sovereign medicameht, both for outward and inward maladies; it helpeth the 
grief of the jaws, the kernels growing within the mouth, and the squinancy; 
{tis drank against the biting of a serpent or a mad dog; it is good for such as 
have eaten mushrooms, for the falling sicknéss, and against the surfeit. Being 
boiled, it is lighter of digestion, and more nourishing.’’ 
