The best honey is the product of the milder parts of the temperate
zone. There are too many rank and poisonous plants in the tropics.
Honey from certain districts of Turkey produces headache and vomiting,
and that from Brazil is used chiefly as medicine. The honey of Mount
Hymettus owes its fine quality to wild thyme. The best honey in Persia
and in Florida is collected from the orange blossom. The celebrated
honey of Narbonne in the south of France is obtained from a species of
rosemary. In Scotland good honey is made from the blossoming heather.

California honey is white and delicate and highly perfumed, and now
takes the lead in the market. But honey is honey the world over; and
the bee is the bee still. "Men may degenerate," says an old traveler,
"may forget the arts by which they acquired renown; manufactures may
fail, and commodities be debased; but the sweets of the wild-flowers of
the wilderness, the industry and natural mechanics of the bee, will
continue without change or derogation."



II

SHARP EYES

Noting how one eye seconds and reinforces the other, I have often
amused myself by wondering what the effect would be if one could go on
opening eye after eye to the number say of a dozen or more. What would
he see? Perhaps not the invisible,--not the odors of flowers or the
fever germs in the air,--not the infinitely small of the microscope or
the infinitely distant of the telescope. This would require, not more