human
Sylvan Sketches, (1825), informs us, on the authority of Lightfoot, that
gpt
The infant Zeus, of the Greeks, was first fed by the Melian nymphs with honey
human
There was a positive, as well as a mythic, reason why the Greeks should give the ash a name signifying sweetness, because the _Fraxinus ornus_, a species of ash indigenous in the south of Europe, yields manna from its slit bark. They may also have conceived that honey dropped upon the earth as dew from the heavenly ash, for Theophrastus mentions a kind of honey which fell in that form from the air, and which was therefore called _aeromelia_.
gpt
The father puts his mouth to the right ear of the new-born babe, and murmurs three times, 'Speech! speech!' Then he gives it a name, 'Thou art Veda;' that is its secret name. Then he mixes clotted milk, honey, and butter, and feeds the babe with it out of pure gold.
human
Amazing toughness of popular tradition! Some thousands of years ago the ancestors of this Highland nurse had known the _Fraxinus ornus_ in Arya, or on their long journey through Persia, Asia Minor, and the south of Europe, and they had given its honey-like juice as divine food to their children; and now their descendant, imitating their practice in the cold North, but totally ignorant of its true meaning, puts the nauseous sap of her native ash into the mouth of her hapless charge, because her mother, and her grandmother, and her grandmother's mother had done the same thing before her. 'The reason,' we are told by a modern native authority, 'for giving ash-sap to new-born children in the Highlands of Scotland, is, first, because it acts as a powerful astringent; and secondly, because the ash, in common with the rowan, is supposed to possess the property of resisting the attacks of witches, fairies, and other imps of darkness.'