92 
BRITISH BEES. 
was afflicted with a violent pain in his belly; upon 
which the Prophet bade him give him some honey. Th'e 
fellow took his advice; but soon after, coming again, 
told him that the medicine had done his brother no 
manner of service. Mahomet answered: ‘ Go and 
give him more honey , for God speaks* truth, and thy 
brother’s belly lies/ And the dose being repeated, the 
man, by God’s mercy, was immediately cured/’ 
That the primitive Egyptians were familiar with the 
peculiar economy of the bee in its monarchical institu¬ 
tion is proved by the figure of the bee being adopted 
as the symbolical character expressive of the idea of 
a people governed by a sovereign This figure is fre¬ 
quently met with upon Egyptian sculptures and tablets, 
dating as far back as the twelfth dynasty; but upon 
these the bee is very rudely represented, being figured 
with only four legs and two wings; but upon a tablet 
of the twentieth dynasty the bee is correctly represented 
with four wings and six legs. 
All these facts take us far back in the history of the 
bee. But the indication of a higher antiquity of its 
domestication may be traced in the Sanskrit, wherein 
ma signifies honey, madhupa, honey-drinker, and ma- 
dhukara, honey-maker, the root of the latter signify¬ 
ing “to build/’ Madhu has clearly the signification of 
our mead, thence we may thus trace an affinity, point¬ 
ing to those early times, for the origin of a drink still in 
use amongst us. In Chinese mih, or mat (in different 
dialects) signifies honey, thus clearly showing a second 
derivation, in this Turonian term, from a more primitive 
language whence both flowed. In the Shemitic branch 
nothing analogous is to be traced. But this double 
convergence to a more distant point veiled in the obscu- 
