66 
The passages of authors who make mention of this belief 
have been collected by Bochart (Hierozoicon), and, among them, 
the following: 
Antigonus (Mirabilium historia, 23) says that, when an ox 
is buried so that the horns protrude, and these are sawn off, 
bees escape therefrom, the rotting ox being converted into bees. 
Varro (de re rustica JJ, 5 and III, 16) observes that bees 
orginate in part from other bees, in part from rotten oxen. The 
same is repeated by Columella (9, 14), also by Democritus, 
Mago, and Philo who mentions it as a popular notion (De vic- 
timis offerentibus § 6). Likewise by Pliny, N. H. XI, 20, Plu- 
tarch in Cleomenes, Aelian II, 57; Galen (An animal sit quod 
in utero geritur, edit. Kithn, XIX, 5, p. 175), Origenes (Contra 
Celsum IV, 57) (1), Florentinus (Geoponica, XV) ete. 
The frequent mention of it in poetry also proves that it 
was a well-known popular belief: Ovid (Metam. XV, 365), and 
Virgil (Georg. IV). It was owing to this belief that bees were 
called oxen-born, bugenes. 
From such passages it was concluded that the dislike of 
bees for carcases might be subject to exception, that a tole- 
rably clean skeleton, and less fastidious bees, might be recon- 
ciled with the verisimilitude of the story of Samson, the more so 
as the text says nothing about the origin of the bees. Such was 
the resource of Lorinus and of Tostatus, who distinguished two 
kinds of bees, and of Bochart, on whose erudition his succes- 
sors have subsisted, so that even Polus borrowed from him the 
reference to Soranus’s , Vita Hippocratis*, containing the story 
of Hippocrates’s Mausoleum: bees founded a colony in it, for 
which undertaking they had had plenty of time, because 
Laich (spawn), just as the Baglish loaf to the German Lath, hoarse to heiser ete. 
(Merx). - 
(1) Origenes, in this passage, uses the transformation of carcases into insects 
as an argument in favor of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. He takes 
advantage of all the phenomena observed on decaying bodies, including the 
transformation of the spinal marrow into. a snake. Compare, as typical, the 
interpretation of Ephraim at the end of this paper (Merx), 
