But speculation on the probable antiquity of bee-keeping need not stop here. The best authorities estimate that human life has existed on the earth for perhaps a hundred thousand years. The earliest traces of man, far back in the twilight of palæolithic times, reveal him as a hunting and fighting animal, in whom the instinct to cultivate the soil or domesticate the creatures about him had not yet developed. Later on in the Stone Age—but still in infinitely remote times—it is evident that he tamed several creatures, such as the ox, the sheep, and the goat, keeping them in confinement, and killing them for food as he required it, instead of resorting to the old ceaseless roaming after wild game. At this time, too, he took to sowing corn, and even baking or charring some sort of bread. It must be remembered that if a hundred thousand years is to be set down as the limit of man’s life on the earth, probably the development of other living creatures, as well as most forms of vegetable life, took place immeasurably earlier. The chances are that the world of trees and flowering-plants, in which aboriginal man moved, differed in no great degree from the world of green things surrounding human life to-day. It is certain that the apple, pear, raspberry, blackberry, and plum were common fruits of the country-side in the later Stone Age, for seeds of all these have been found in conjunction with neolithic remains. Evidence of the existence of the beech and elm—the latter a famous pollen-yielder—has been discovered at a very much earlier time. All the conditions favourable to insect-life must have been present in the world ages before man appeared in it; and insect-life undoubtedly existed then in a high state of development. It would be as unreasonable, therefore, not to infer that the honey-bee was ready on the earth with her stores of sweet-food for man, as that man did not speedily discover that store, and make it an object of his daily search, just as he went forth daily to hunt and kill four-footed game.