The intimate connection of “Bees” with nature’s elegancies, the Flowers, is an association which links them agreeably to our regard, for each suggests the other; their vivacity and music giving animation and variety to what might otherwise pall by beautiful but inanimate attractions. When we combine with this the services bees perform in their eager pursuits, our admiration extends beyond them to their Great Originator, who, by such apparently small means, accomplishes so simply yet completely, a most important object of creation. That bees were cultivated by man in the earliest conditions of his existence, possibly whilst his yet limited family was still occupying the primitive cradle of the race at Hindoo Koosh, or on the fertile slopes of the Himalayas, or upon the more distant table-land or plateau of Thibet, or in the delicious vales of Cashmere, or wherever it might have been, somewhere widely away to the east of the Caspian Sea,—is a very probable supposition. Accident, furthered by curiosity, would have early led to the discovery of the stores of honey which the assiduity of bees had hoarded;—its agreeable savour would have induced further search, which would have strengthened the possession by keener observation, and have led in due course to the fixing them in his immediate vicinity. To this remote period, possibly not so early as the discovery of the treasures of the bee, may be assigned also the first domestication of the animals useful to man, many of which are still found in those districts in all their primitive wildness. The discovery and cultivation of the cereal plants will also date from this early age. The domestication of animals has never been satisfactorily explained, but all inquiry seems to point to those regions as the native land, both of them, and of the _gramineæ_, which produce our grain; for Heinzelmann, Linnæus’s enthusiastic disciple, found there those grasses still growing wild, which have not been found elsewhere in a natural state.