Perhaps no better general idea is to be obtained of the condition of bee-knowledge among the ancients than from the writings of Pliny, the Elder, who was born in A.D. 23. He, too, deals with the ox-born bees; but the reader’s interest will centre for the most part in Pliny’s grave and careful account of the life and customs of the honey-bee, as commonly accepted among his contemporaries. Very few indeed of the facts he so picturesquely details have any real foundation in truth. Like nearly all the classic writers, he had little more accurate knowledge of the life within the hive than we have of the bottom of the Pacific Ocean But he made up for this deficiency, as did all others of his time, by dipping largely into the stores of his own fancy as well as those of other people. His account of the origin and nature of honey is quaintly pleasant reading. “Honey,” he says, “is engendered from the air, mostly at the rising of the constellations, and more especially when Sirius is shining; never, however, before the rising of the Vergiliæ, and then just before daybreak. . . . Whether it is that this liquid is the sweat of the heavens, or whether a saliva emanating from the stars, or a juice exuding from the air while purifying itself—would that it had been, when it comes to us, pure, limpid, and genuine, as it was when first it took its downward descent. But, as it is, falling from so vast a height, attracting corruption in its passage, and tainted by the exhalations of the earth as it meets them; sucked, too, as it is, from off the trees and the herbage of the fields, and accumulated in the stomachs of the bees, for they cast it up again through the mouth; deteriorated besides by the juices of flowers, and then steeped within the hives and subjected to such repeated changes:—still, in spite of all this, it affords us by its flavour a most exquisite pleasure, the result, no doubt, of its æthereal nature and origin.”