One last extract must be given from the same old writer. It relates to the generation of bees, and brings us out, perhaps, on the highest pinnacle of the marvellous. After a learned dissertation on the method of breeding bees from a dead ox—assuring us, however, that if we can procure a dead lion for the purpose, it will be much better, as then the bees will have a lion-like courage—the writer goes on to explain how bees may be produced in another way. We are to save all dead bees, burn them, sprinkle the ashes with wine, and then leave them exposed to the sun in a warm place. In a little while, we are told, all the bees so treated will come to life again, and we shall then have a new stock ready for hiving. Dipping into these time-worn records of the Middle Ages, with their embrowned, scarce legible type and their antiquated phraseology, one comes at last to realise how very little the old bee-masters actually understood of the true ways of the honey-bee, or, indeed, of any real essential in bee-craft. And yet the production of honey and wax must have been an industry very largely developed in those days. Somehow or other, in spite of archaic theories and useless interference in the work of their hives, these people must have contrived to supply a market of whose magnitude we can nowadays form little conception. The trade in wax alone must have been a very large one, for, except in the poorest tenements, this formed the only available source of artificial light. And honey was in much more universal demand than it is now, because cane-sugar could hardly have developed into a serious rival as a sweetening agent among the masses at a time when it stood, perhaps, at two shillings a pound. But in speculations of this kind, it must be borne in mind that, although the men who wrote about bees displayed so picturesque an ignorance in all matters appertaining to their charges, these formed a very small minority among the bee-keepers as a whole. Probably the bulk of the supply in honey and wax came from bee-gardens, whose owners neither knew nor cared anything about books, and were concerned only in the practical side of the work, where their knowledge, hereditary for the most part, amply sufficed for the part they played in it.