PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. 
7 
intimate how very early, even in the present condition 
of the earth, bees were beneficial to mankind, and that, 
therefore, the connection may have subsisted, as I have 
previously urged, in the remotest and very primitive 
ages of the existence of man; and that imperatively with 
them, the entire family of which they form a unit only, 
was also created. 
In America, where Apis mellifica is of European in¬ 
troduction, swarms of this bee, escaping domestication, 
resume their natural condition, and have pressed forward 
far into the uncleared wild; and widely in advance of 
the conquering colonist, they have taken their abode in 
the primitive, unreclaimed forest. Nor do they remain 
stationary, but on, still on, with every successive year, 
spreading in every direction; and thus surely indicating 
to the aboriginal red-man the certain, if even slow, ap¬ 
proach of civilization, and the consequent necessity of 
his own protective retreat:—a strong instance of the dis¬ 
tributive processes of nature. It clearly shows how the 
wild bees may have similarly migrated in all directions 
from the centre of their origin. That they are now 
found at the very ultima Thule, so far away from their 
assumed incunabula, and with such apparent existing 
obstructions to their distributive progresses a proof, had 
we no other, that the condition of the earth must have 
been geographically very different at the period of their 
beginning, and that vast geological changes have, since 
then, altered its physical features. Where islands now 
exist, these must then have formed portions of widely 
sweeping continents; and seas have been dry land, which 
have since swept over the same area, insulating irregular 
portions by the submergence of irregular intervals, and 
thus have left them in their present condition, with 
