Honey 195 



was the source of the offspring of the bees ; and while they 

 belie\ ed them to gather the latter from flowers, they were 

 convinced the honey came not from flowers but from the 

 sky above. 



Aristotle says, " Honey falls from the air, principally 

 about the rising of the stars, and when the rainbow rests 

 upon the earth. Generally no honey is produced before 

 the rising of the Pleiades." 



Phny, too, goes into very interesting details upon the 

 subject. 



"This substance,'' he says, "is engendered from the air, 

 mostly at the rising of the constellations, and more espe- 

 cially when Sirius is shining ; never, however, before the 

 rising of the Vergiliae, and then just before daybreak. 



" Hence it is, that at early dawn the leaves of the trees 

 are found covered with a kind of honey-like dew, and those 

 who go into the open air at an early hour in the morning 

 find their clothes covered, and their hair matted, with a sort 

 of unctuous liquid. Whether it is that this liquid is the 

 sweat of the heavens, or whether a saliva emanating from 

 the stars, or a juice exuding from the air while purifying 

 itself, would that it had been, when it comes to us, pure, 

 limpid, and genuine, as it was when first it took its down- 

 ward descent. But as it is, falling from so vast a height, 

 attracting corruption in its passage, and tainted by the 

 exhalations of the earth as it meets them ; sucked, too, as it 

 is, from off the trees and the herbage of the fields and 

 accumulated in the stomachs of the bees, — for they cast it 

 up again through the mouth ; deteriorated besides by the 

 juices of flowers, and then steeped within the hives and 

 subjected to such repeated changes, — still, in spite of all 

 this, it affords us, by its flavor, a most exquisite pleasure, 

 the result, no doubt, of its ethereal nature and origin." 



According to the Eddas, honey-dew was a distillation 



