92 Honey, its Origin and Adulteration. 



"being nearly incapable of fermentation, and is by these means 

 obtained from honey for examination. A very remarkable fact 

 is that manna-sugar occurs in many of our seaweeds, as Fucus 

 vesiculosus, Halidrys siliquosa, Laminaria saccharina, etc. The 

 latter contains as much as twelve per cent. It may be detected 

 also in the dandelion and celery plants. 



All the sugars are splendid objects for the polariscope. A 

 very beautiful method of exhibiting manna-sugar is by fusing 

 a little on a glass slip over a spirit-lamp, and when cooling, 

 touching three or four spots with the point of a needle, when 

 circular crystals will form, showing the purest and most ex- 

 quisite colours, rivalling the similar and well-known salicine 

 slides. 



At the base of the corolla of a flower, on the thalamus, is a 

 part termed by botanists " The Disk." It is that portion 

 which intervenes between the stamens and the pistil. It is 

 composed of bodies usually in the shape of scales or glands. 

 When examined at the proper season, they are seen to abound 

 in a thick, sweet fluid, which, since the days of Aristotle and 

 Virgil, has rejoiced in the name of " nectar." On this account 

 the fruit yielding it received formerly the name of " nectary.'" 

 Even in the present day those organs are the subject of much 

 misapprehension. Linnaeus and his followers gave the term 

 nectary to any gland or organ for whose office they could not 

 otherwise account. 



The plants which furnish the greatest quantity of nectar, 

 and therefore most liked by the bees, generally excrete it from 

 the disk of the flower. 



On many plants, however, as the ranunculus and fritillaria, 

 a small glandular organ occurs at the base of each petal, and 

 in which also nectar is enclosed, though not in such profusion 

 as in the disk before alluded to. 



As will presently be shown, this nectar is a simple solution 

 of cane-sugar formed from the amylaceous sap of the flower 

 and elaborated for the nutrition of stamens and pistil. What 

 the bees find in the flowers is the surplus left when these 

 organs have been supplied. The author examined every flower 

 he could collect at the early season of the year (April and May) 

 and found sugar in them all, whether furnished with disks, or 

 nectariferous glands, or not ; and came to the conclusion that 

 sugar is necessary to the male reproductive organs of the 

 flower, as it is in them chiefly to be found, the so-called nectari- 

 ferous body merely serving the purpose of a reservoir. 



M. L. Bravais, in a paper published in Ann. des Sciences, 

 2nd ser. vol. xviii. pp. 152, is of this opinion, and says : — The 

 nectar-bearing parts occur rarely on the pistil or calyx, but 

 generally on some part of the andraeceum, always accompany- 



