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In Egypt and the East: Egyptians

We know that honey was a common ingredient of the medicines of the Egyptians, and that it was added to the most obnoxious compounds, as of lizard's blood, teeth of swine, putrid meat and stinking fat, the moisture from pig's ears, and excreta of all kinds.

Some of the old remedies, however, were far from objectionable, as, for instance, the following: -- To draw blood from a wound, take of wax, fat, datewine, honey, and boiled horn each one part. It was considered really strengthening to the hair to anoint it with the tooth of a donkey crushed in honey! Bees were carefully cultivated by the ancient Egyptians, who had floating apiaries, or boats bearing hives, that ascended the Nile, and drifted slowly down, following the blossoming of the plants along the banks as the annual inundation receded.

This custom still prevailed in modern times, as the writings of travellers testify. Barges or flatboats proceeded up the river, gathering the hives of the villages as they went, and after a migration of two or three months returned the laden hives to their owners.

It is probable that the ancient bees are the progenitors of those found in Egypt to-day, gray-haired with two bright orange bands on the large end of the abdomen - very yellow and very cross. In one author we read the following concerning beekeeping in ancient Egypt: - "To the garden department belonged the care of the bees, which were kept in hives very much like our own. Honey was thought of great importance, both for household purposes and for an offering to the gods." In Egypt and the East It is said that the dead were occasionally preserved in honey, which seems to have been a common practice in some other countries, and Plutarch tells us the following of Agesilaus, who on his way home from Egypt was shipwrecked and perished on a desert shore of Africa : - "It was the custom of the Spartans to bury persons of ordinary rank in the place where they expired, when they happened to die in a foreign country, but to carry the corpses of their kings home. And as the attendants of Agesilaus had not honey to preserve the body, they embalmed it with melted wax, and in this way conveyed it to Lacedæmon."

Whether the practice of embalming with honey was learned in Egypt or in some other country is not stated.

It certainly was not the ordinary custom of the Egyptians to preserve their dead in honey, though there are stories of its being occasionally done, as witness the following: - "Abdallatif, whom we have so often quoted, gives some additional information about mummies which is well worth noticing. "Besides the mummies that were found in wood and stone coffins, he speaks of others found in vessels of honey. man of veracity,' says the Doctor, assured me that he and his friends, while looking for treasures near the pyramids, found a vessel well sealed, which they opened and discovered to contain honey. While they were tasting it, one of them remarked a hair that stuck to his finger; he pulled it and they saw a child appear, with all its limbs adhering together, its body quite fresh and ornamented with jewels."