492 HONEY HANDLING. 



Uses of 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 sweet 

 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 as a 

 condiment lilje 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.* 



" It 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 upou bee-prodticts : 



' ' Natural wax is altered liy distillation into an oyl of marvellons 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 clearcth the heart and lights of those humors which 

 fall ftom the head ; it purneth the foulness of the body, cureth phlegmatick 

 matter, and sharpeneth the stomach; it pur%'eth those things which hurt the 

 clearness of the eyes, breedeth good blood, stirreth up natural heat, and pro- 

 longethlife; it keepeth all things uncorrupt which are put into it, and is a 

 sovereign medicament, both for outward and inward maladies; it helpeth the 

 grief of the jaws, the kernels growing within the mouth, and the squinancy ; 

 it is drank against the biting of a serpent or a mad dog; it is good for such as 

 have eaten mushrooms, for the falling sickness, and against the surfeit. Being 

 boiled, it is lighter of digestion, and more nourishing." 



