These islands, under certain modifications, were, previous to the glacial period, one land with the continent of Europe; and it was when thus connected that those many tropical forms of animal life, whose fossil remains are found embedded in our soil, passed hither. By the comparatively rapid intervention of geological changes, some of the lower forms of life went no further than the first land they reached, and are, consequently, not even now to be found so far west as Ireland: the migration appears clearly to have come from the East. Thus, although we have no direct evidence of the presence of “bees,” yet as insects must have existed here, from the certainty that the remains of insect-feeding reptiles are found, as well as those of herbivorous animals, it may be concluded that “bees” also abounded. Claiming thus this very high antiquity for man’s nutritive “bee,” which was of far earlier utility to him than the silkworm, whose labours demanded a very advanced condition of skill and civilization to be made available; it is perfectly consistent, and indeed needful, to claim the simultaneous existence of all the bee’s allies. The earliest Shemitic and Aryan records, the Book of Job, the Vedas, Egyptian sculptures and papyri, as well as the poems of Homer, confirm the early cultivation of bees by man for domestic uses; and their frequent representation in Egyptian hieroglyphics, wherein the bee occurs as the symbol of royalty, clearly shows that their economy, with a monarch at its head, was known; a hive, too, being figured, as Sir Gardner Wilkinson tells us, upon a very ancient tomb at Thebes, is early evidence of its domestication there, and how early, even historically, it was brought under the special dominion of mankind. To these particulars I shall have occasion to refer more fully when the course of my narrative brings me to treat of the geographical distribution of the “honey-bee;” I adduce it now merely to 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.