114 DIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 



not wholly pass over the serious and sometimes fatal effects 

 produced upon some persons by eating honey, or even by 

 drinking mead. I once knew a lady upon whom these acted 

 like poison, and have heard of instances in which death was 

 the consequence. Sometimes, when bees extract their honey 

 from poisonous plants, such results have not been confined to 

 individuals of a particular habit or constitution. A remarkable 

 proof of this is given by Dr. Barton in the fifth volume of 

 The American Philosophical Transactions. In the autumn 

 and winter of the year 1790 an extensive mortality was pro- 

 duced amongst those who had partaken of the honey collected 

 in the neighbourhood of Philadelphia. The attention of the 

 American government was excited by the general distress, a 

 minute inquiry into the cause of the mortality ensued, and it 

 was satisfactorily ascertained that the honey had been chiefly 

 extracted from the flowers of Kalmia latifolia. Though the 

 honey mentioned in Xenophon's well-known account of the 

 eflect of a particular sort eaten by the Grecian soldiers during 

 the celebrated retreat after the death of the younger Cyrus 

 did not operate fatally, it gave those of the soldiers who ate 

 it in small quantities the appearance of being intoxicated, and 

 such as partook of it freely, of being mad or about to die, 

 numbers lying on the ground as if after a defeat. A spe- 

 cimen of this honey, which still retains its deleterious pro- 

 perties, was sent to the Zoological Society in 1834, from Tre- 

 bizond on the Black Sea, by Keith E. Abbott, Esq.^ 



Amongst other direct injuries occasioned by these creatures, 

 perhaps, out of regard for the ladies, I ought to notice the 

 alarm which many of them occasion to the loveliest part of 

 the creation. When some females retire from society to 

 avoid a wasp, others faint at the sight of a spider, and others, 

 again, die with terror if they hear a death-watch: these 

 groundless apprehensions and superstitious alarms are as 

 much real evils to those who feel them as if they were well 

 founded. But having already adverted to this subject, I shall 

 here only quote the observation of a wise man, that " Fear is 

 a betraying of the succours that reason offer eth.^^'^ The best 



1 Xenophon, Anabas. 1. iv. Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond. i. proc. xxxi. 



2 Wisd. xvii. 12. 



