19 
asked Yiad? — The surveyor answered: ,Hearing that there 
was a hive near the seacoast, I sent people to gather the honey. 
They told me that they found at that place a heap of bones, 
more or less rotten, in the cavity of which bees had deposited 
the honey that they brought with them.“ This ease, as a parallel 
to Samson’s bees, is a remarkable instance of the force of 
imaginative association in the human brain, and of the sameness 
of its illogical action under similar circumstances. In both cases 
a carcase was seen, with /. tenax swarming about it, and in 
both cases the witnesses, taking them for bees, amplified their 
tale by the addition of an imaginary honey. Unlike Samson’s 
story, where the condition of the carcase has been a matter of dis- 
pute among interpreters, the Arabian case distinctly admits the 
state of rottenness, and thus primd facie betrays its absurdity, 
as bees are proverbially cleanly animals. We shall presently 
mention a similar instance of imaginative association from China. 
Since the appeal to the public which I published in , Nature“ 
Dec. 28 1893 (comp. above, the Postscript of the Preface), a 
very interesting article appeared in the same paper on May 10 
1894, about the mention of LHristalis tenav in the Chinese lite- 
rature of former centuries. The author of the article (Mr. Ku- 
magusu Minakata) has had the kindness to complete his state- 
ments in a further communication by letter. It seems that in 
China, like anywhere else, this fly was confused with the honey- 
bee. Observing it to visit out-houses and cesspools, the Chinese 
druggists concluded that the pretended bee went to such places 
to collect ingredients for honey. A ,Materia Medica‘ of the 
XVI" century by Li Schi-Chin contains such an assertion as a 
positive fact. Jokushin Kaibara, a moralist and naturalist in 
Japan (1628—1714) in his ,Materia Medica“ (1708) refutes this 
assertion. But in China the majority of druggists entertained 
this opinion formerly, and perhaps may do it even now. A 
Chinese writer of the XVII century, Sie T’sai-Kang in his 
»Miscellanies of the Five Phenomena® (1) (Japanese edition 
(1) The five Phenomena are: Heaven, Marth, Man, Thing, and Act (pro- 
hably meaning: Deed, Action ?). 
