Natural History — Book XI

Pliny the Younger & Pliny the Elder · a new plain-English translation from the Latin

praef| There remain animals of boundless subtlety, since some writers have reported that they do not breathe and even lack blood. They are numerous and of many kinds, living the life of land creatures and of flying ones — some [….] winged, like bees, some in both ways, like ants, and some lacking both wings and feet — and all are rightly called insects, from the incisions which, now at the neck, now at the chest and belly, girdle the body and separate its members, which are joined only by a slender tube. In some, however, the fold of the incision does not run all the way round, but on the belly, or only on the back, the segments overlap like tiles with flexible joints. Nowhere else is nature's craftsmanship more worth beholding.

2| For in large bodies, or at any rate in the larger ones, the workshop had an easy task with material that obeyed it; but in these, so small and so nearly nothing, what reasoning, what power, what intricate perfection! Where has she lodged so many senses in the gnat? And there are other creatures smaller still to speak of. But where has she set its sight in front of it? Where has she fitted its taste? Where has she inserted its smell? And where has she engendered that fierce voice of its, so very loud for its size?

3| With what subtlety she has attached its wings, drawn out the long legs of its feet, laid out a hungry cavity to serve as its belly, and kindled in it a thirst greedy for blood, and above all human blood! And with what ingenuity she has pointed the weapon with which it pierces the skin, and — as though it had room to spare, when its slenderness cannot even be seen — has fashioned it with a twofold art, so that it should be at once sharp for boring and hollow like a pipe for sucking! What teeth she has fixed in the teredo for boring through oak, as their sound, like that of augers, bears witness, and how she has made wood its chief food!

4| Yet we marvel at the tower-bearing shoulders of elephants, at the necks of bulls and their savage tossings into the air, at the raids of tigers and the manes of lions, when nature is nowhere more wholly herself than in the smallest things. I therefore ask my readers not to condemn with disdain even what is reported of these creatures merely because they look down on many of them, since in the contemplation of nature nothing can seem superfluous.

5| Many have denied that insects breathe, and they make the case by reasoning, on the ground that they have no internal organs for the work of breathing. So, they say, insects live as crops and trees do; but it makes a very great difference whether something breathes or lives. For the same reason, they say, insects have no blood, since there is none in any creature that lacks a heart and a liver; and so too creatures that lack a lung do not breathe. From this a long series of questions arises.

6| For the same people also deny that insects have a voice, amid all the humming of bees and the noise of cicadas, and other things which will be weighed in their proper places. But to me, as I contemplate nature, she has always counselled me to think nothing about her incredible. Nor do I see why such creatures should be any more able to live without drawing breath than to breathe without internal organs — which we have shown to happen even in sea creatures, although the density and depth of the water shut out the air.

7| That some creatures should fly and yet lack breath, though they live in the very air; that they should have a sense of getting their food, of reproduction and of work, and even a care for the future; and that, although they have no organs to carry the senses as a keel carries a ship, they should nonetheless have hearing, smell and taste, and besides these the outstanding gifts of nature — skill, spirit, art: who would readily believe it?

8| I grant that they have no blood in the way that land animals have it, all of them alike among themselves. But just as in the sea the ink of the cuttlefish holds the power of blood, and in the purpura family that dyeing juice does, so in insects too, whatever their vital fluid is, that will be their blood. In the end, let everyone hold his own opinion: our purpose is to point out the evident natures of things, not to hunt for their doubtful causes.

9| Insects, so that this may be understood, do not appear to have sinews, bones, spines, cartilage, fat or flesh, nor even a brittle shell like certain sea creatures, nor anything that could rightly be called skin, but a body of a nature somewhere between all of these: like something dried out, softer than sinew, and in its other parts more truly protected than hard. This is all they have, and nothing besides. Inside there is nothing, except in a very few, a coiled intestine.

10| So when they are torn apart they show an extraordinary vitality, and their separate parts go on quivering, because whatever that principle of life may be, it resides not in particular members but in the whole body — though least of all in the head, and the head alone does not move unless it is torn off together with the chest. In no class of animal are there more feet; and those of them that have the most live longest after being torn apart, as we see in scolopendras. They have eyes, and among the senses they have touch and taste as well; some have smell too, and a few hearing.

11| But among all of these the first place belongs to bees, and rightly the chief admiration, since they alone of that class were born for the sake of man. They gather honey, the sweetest, finest and most wholesome of juices; they shape combs and wax for a thousand uses of life; they endure toil, complete their works, have a commonwealth, hold counsels even as individuals but have leaders as a body, and, what may be most wonderful of all, they have a moral character beyond the rest of the animals, though they belong to a kind neither tame nor wild.

12| So great is nature that out of what is almost the smallest shadow of an animal she has made something beyond compare. What sinews, what strength could we set beside such efficacy and industry? What men, by heaven, could we set beside them in reason — they who are certainly superior in this, that they know nothing but the common good? Let there be no question about the soul; let it be agreed about the blood as well: yet how little of it can there be in creatures so little? Let us weigh their intelligence after that.

13| They hide in winter — for whence would they have strength to bear frosts and snows and the blasts of the north winds? — as indeed do all insects, but for less time those that, hidden in our walls, are warmed early. As to bees, either the reckoning of times and places has changed, or the earlier writers erred. They hide from the setting of the Pleiades and lie concealed beyond their rising — so they do not lie hidden only until the beginning of spring, as those writers said, nor does anyone in Italy think of the hives before the beans are in flower —,

14| they go out to their works and labors, and no day, when the sky has allowed, is lost to idleness. First they build the combs, shape the wax, that is, make houses and cells, then the brood, afterward honey, wax from flowers, bee-glue from the tears of trees that produce gum, from the sap of willow, elm and reed, from gum, from resin.

15| With these they first coat the hive itself within all over, as with a kind of plaster, and with other bitterer juices against the greed of other small creatures, aware that they are about to make something others may covet; with the same they build wider doors around too.

16| Experts call the first foundations commosis, the second pissoceros, the third propolis, laid between the coats and the wax, of great use in medicines. Commosis is the first crust, of a bitter taste. Pissoceros comes over it, in the manner of pitch-makers, like a thinner wax. Propolis is from the milder gum of vines and poplars, of an already thicker matter with flowers added, not yet wax, however, but the stabilizing of the combs, by which all entrances of cold or injury are stopped, itself still heavy in smell, so that most people use it in place of galbanum.

17| Besides these, erithace is brought together, which some call sandaraca, others cerinthum. This will be the bees' food while they are working, which is often found stored away in the hollows of the combs, and itself of bitter taste. It is produced from spring dew and the sap of trees like gums; it is gathered smaller in figs, blacker with the breath of the south wind, better and reddish with the north winds, and most abundant in Greek nuts. Menecrates says it is a flower, but no one besides him.

18| They make wax from the flowers of all trees and crops except sorrel and echinopus; these are kinds of herbs. Falsely too is esparto excepted, since in Spain much honey in the esparto-fields tastes of that herb. Falsely also, I think, are olives excepted, since it is certain that very many swarms are produced when the olive crop comes. They harm no fruits. They do not settle on dead flowers, much less on bodies.

19| They work within 60 paces and, when the flowers nearby are used up, they send out scouts to farther pastures; caught at night on an expedition, they keep watch lying on their backs, to protect their wings from dew; let no one wonder that Aristomachus of Soli, captivated by love of them, did nothing else for fifty-eight years, and Philiscus of Thasos, tending bees in deserted places, surnamed Agrius, both of whom wrote about them.

20| The plan of the work is wonderfully divided: a station at the gates in the manner of a camp, rest until morning, until one rouses them with a double or triple hum, like some trumpet. Then all fly forth, if the day is going to be mild. For they foretell winds and rains when they keep within their dwellings; and so they have this rest among their foreknowledge of the mildness of the sky. When the column has gone forth to the work, some bring in flowers with their feet, others water in the mouth, and drops with the down of the whole body.

21| Those of them in their youth go out to the work and bring in the things mentioned above, the older ones work inside. Those which carry flowers load the thigh with the front feet, rough by nature for this, and the front feet with the mouth, and return wholly laden, spread out with their burden. They are received by three or four each, who unload them.

22| For inside also the duties are divided: some build, some polish, some supply, some prepare food from what has been brought; for they do not eat separately, lest an inequality of work and of food and of time arise. They build, beginning from the vaulting of the hive, and draw the web as from the top of a fabric, with two paths around each act of work, so that some enter by one, others go out by the other.

23| The combs, attached on the upper part and a little also at the sides, at once cling and hang; the bottom does not touch the hive, oblong or round, as the hive has demanded, sometimes also of two kinds, when two swarms with agreeing peoples have had unlike customs. They prop the falling waxes, with arched spaces between pillars from the floor, so that there is no lack of access for repairing.

24| The first three rows are generally built empty, so that nothing may be ready to tempt a thief; the last are filled most of all with honey. For this reason the combs are taken out with the hive turned away. The carriers seek favorable winds. If a storm arises, taking up a small weight of pebble they balance themselves; some report that it is placed on the shoulders. Near the ground they fly in a head wind, avoiding brambles.

25| There is a wonderful watchfulness of the work: they note the idleness of those who are slacking, rebuke them, and soon punish them with death. With wonderful cleanliness they clear everything out of the way, and no filth lies about among the works; indeed the excrement of the workers within, lest they go farther away, they gather into one place and discharge on stormy days and in rest from work.

26| When evening comes on, they hum less and less in the hive, until one flies round with the same hum that roused them, as if commanding rest, and this too in the manner of a camp. Then suddenly all fall silent. The common bees build houses first, then those for the kings. If a richer yield is hoped for, mess-mates are added, and drones. These are the smallest of the cells, but the drones themselves are bigger than the bees.

27| Drones, however, are without a sting, like imperfect bees, begun last by the tired or already worn-out ones, a late brood and as it were the servants of the true bees, for which reason the bees command them and drive them out first to the work, punishing the laggards without mercy. And they help them not only in the work but also in the breeding, the crowd contributing much to the warmth.

28| Certainly the greater their number has been, the greater is the yield of swarms too. When the honey has begun to ripen, the bees drive them away, and many attack each one and slaughter it. Nor is this kind seen except in spring. A drone with its wings taken off and thrown back into the hive itself takes the wings from the rest.

29| For their future commanders they build royal cells in the lowest part of the hive, large, magnificent, separate, standing out with a little knob, which if it is squeezed off, they are not born. All the cells are six-sided, from the work of single feet. None of these things is done at a fixed time, but they seize their tasks on clear days. They fill the cells with honey in one or two days at most.

30| This comes from the air and most of all at the risings of stars, and especially with Sirius itself shining forth, and not at all before the rising of the Pleiades, at the hours before dawn. And so then, at first dawn, leaves of trees are found dewy with honey, and if any have been out in the open in the morning, they feel their clothes greased with liquid and their hair clotted, whether that is the sweat of the sky or a certain spittle of the stars or the juice of the air purging itself; and would that it were pure and liquid and of its own nature, as it falls at first!

31| But as it is, falling from so great a height and growing much fouled while it comes, and tainted by the exhalation of the land it meets, besides being drunk from foliage and pastures and gathered into the little bellies of the bees — for they vomit it from the mouth —, and in addition spoiled by the juice of flowers and steeped in the faults of the hive and so often altered, it still brings great pleasure of a heavenly nature.

32| There it is always best where it is stored in the little jars of the best flowers. This happens in the region of Attica at Hymettus, and in Sicily at Hybla, soon on the island Calydna. At first, however, the honey is like diluted water, and in the first days it ferments like new wine and purges itself; on the twentieth day it thickens, soon is covered with a thin membrane, which forms from the foam of the fermentation itself. The best, least tainted with leaf, is drawn from the leaves of oak, linden and reeds.

33| The highest goodness depends on the nation, as we said above, in several ways. For in one place combs distinguished by their wax are produced, as in Sicily and among the Paeligni; in another an abundance of honey, as in Crete, Cyprus and Africa; in another by size, as in the northern regions, a comb having already been seen in Germany eight feet in length, black in its hollow part.

34| In any region, however, there are three kinds of honey. The spring honey, with the comb built from flowers, which is therefore called anthinum. Some forbid that this be touched, so that a strong brood may come out with abundant nourishment. Others leave the bees less of this than of any other honey, since a great richness follows at the rising of great stars, and besides at the solstice, when thyme and the grape begin to flower, the chief material of the cells.

35| In taking out the combs, however, careful management is necessary, since for lack of food they lose hope and die or scatter, whereas abundance brings sloth, and then they feed on honey and not on erithace. Therefore the more careful leave a fifteenth part of this vintage for the bees. The set day for beginning, as by a certain law of nature, if men would know or observe it, is the thirtieth from the swarm's being led out, and this vintage is generally closed in the month of May.

36| The second kind is the honey of summer, which is therefore called horaeon from its special seasonableness, with Sirius itself shining forth, about 30 days after the solstice. Around this an immense subtlety of nature has been laid open to mortals, were not the fraud of men to corrupt everything with ruin.

37| For from the rising of any star, but of the noble ones most, or a rainbow, if rains do not follow but dew grows warm under the rays of the sun, medicines are produced, not honeys, heavenly gifts for the eyes, ulcers and inward parts. If this is kept at the rising of Sirius, and it happens to coincide on the same day, as often, with the rising of Venus or Jupiter or Mercury, there is made no other sweetness and power for calling mortals' ills back from death than that of divine nectar.

38| Honey is gathered more abundantly at full moon, richer on a clear day. In all honey, that which has flowed of itself, like must and oil, is called acetum. All summer honey is most praiseworthy when reddish, as made in the drier days. White honey is not made where there is thyme, but is thought most suitable for the eyes and ulcers. From thyme it is of golden color, of most pleasing flavor, by which it is made plain; [….] rich in the little jars, thick from the sea dew. That which solidifies, however, is least praised.

39| Thyme honey does not curdle, and at touch sends out very fine threads, which is the first proof of goodness; that drops break off at once and spring back is held an indication of poor quality. The next test is that it be fragrant and from sweet to sharp, sticky, and translucent.

40| In the summer honey harvest Cassius Dionysius recommends that a tenth part be left to the bees, if the hives have been full; if less, in proportion, or, if empty, that they not be touched at all. For this vintage the Athenians gave as the sign of beginning the first appearance of the wild fig, others the day sacred to Vulcan.

41| The third kind of honey, least approved, is the forest honey, which they call ericaeum. It is gathered after the first autumn rains, when heath alone flowers in the woods, and for that reason is like the sandy kind. The rising of Arcturus, from the day before the Ides of September, produces it most. Some carry the summer harvest on to the rising of Arcturus, because from it to the autumn equinox there remain 14 days, and from the equinox to the setting of the Pleiades, in 48 days, heath is most abundant.

42| The Athenians call it tetralix, Euboea sisyrum, and they think it most agreeable to bees, perhaps because at that time there is no other abundance. This harvest, then, is closed generally when the vintage is over and the Pleiades have set, about the Ides of November. Reason persuades that two parts of it be left for the bees, and always those parts of the combs that have erithace.

43| From midwinter to the rising of Arcturus, for 60 days, they are nourished by sleep without any food. From the rising of Arcturus to the spring equinox, in a milder season, they are already awake, but still keep within the hive and go back to the foods stored up for that time. In Italy, however, they do the same from the rising of the Pleiades and sleep until it.

44| Some weigh the hives in taking out honey, thus apportioning how much they leave. Fairness is indeed required even in them, and they say that if the partnership is cheated the hives die. Above all, then, it is prescribed that those who take out the honey be washed and clean. They hate a stench and women's monthly courses.

45| When honey is taken out, it is most useful to drive the bees off with smoke, lest they grow angry or devour it greedily themselves. By more frequent smoke their sloth too is roused to work, for unless they have brooded, they make livid combs. On the other hand they are tainted by too much smoke, since honey feels the injury very quickly, souring at the least touch of dew. And on this account that kind is kept apart which they call acapnum.

46| In what manner they bring forth their young has been a great and subtle question among scholars. For the coupling of bees has never been seen. Most have thought they are shaped by the mouth from flowers fitly and usefully gathered; some, by the coupling of one, who in each swarm is called king: that he alone is male, of special size, lest he weaken; hence the brood is not produced without him, and the other bees accompany him as females a male, not as a leader. The yield of drones refutes that opinion otherwise probable. For what reason is there that the same coupling should produce others imperfect?

47| The earlier opinion would indeed be nearer, were not another difficulty to meet it. For sometimes in the outermost combs larger bees are born, which drive off the rest. This evil is called oestrus; how is it born, if they themselves shape their young?

48| What is certain is that they brood in the manner of hens. That which has hatched is first seen as a white little worm, lying across and clinging so that it seems part of the wax. The king is at once of honey color, as made from a chosen flower out of all abundance, and not a little worm but at once winged. The rest of the crowd, when it has begun to take shape, are called nymphs, just as drones are called serenes or cephenes.

49| If anyone takes the heads off either before they have wings, they are a most welcome food for the mothers. As time goes on they drip food in and brood, then murmuring most, for the sake, as they think, of making heat, which is necessary for hatching the young, until, the membranes that surround each being broken, the whole column comes forth as with eggs. This was seen at Rome on the suburban estate of a certain man of consular rank, the hives being made of transparent lantern horn.

50| The brood is completed within the 45th day. In some combs there forms what is called a nail, the hardness of bitter wax, when they have not brought forth a brood from there through disease or sloth or natural infertility; this is the abortion of bees. Those brought out, however, work at once with a certain discipline together with their mothers, and a crowd of equal age accompanies the young king. Several kings are begun, lest they be lacking.

51| Afterward, when the offspring of these has begun to be grown, by agreed vote they kill the worst, lest they divide the columns. There are two kinds of them: the better is red, the worse black and varied. All have an excellent form always, and twice as large as the rest, shorter wings, straight legs, a loftier gait, on the brow a spot gleaming white like a kind of diadem. Also in brightness they differ much from the common sort.

52| Let someone now ask whether there was one Hercules, and how many Father Libers, and the rest buried by the neglect of antiquity! Behold, in a small matter attached to our farmsteads, of which there is constant abundance, it is not agreed among authors whether the king alone has no sting, armed only with majesty, or whether nature gave it, but denied him the use of it. This is agreed, that the commander does not use a sting. Wonderful is the obedience of the common sort around him.

53| When he goes forth, the whole swarm is one and balls around him, surrounds him, protects him, does not suffer him to be seen. For the rest of the time, when the people are at work, he himself goes round the works within, like one exhorting, alone exempt. Around him are certain attendants and lictors, constant guardians of authority.

54| He does not go out except when the swarm is about to migrate. This is understood long before, murmuring sounding within for some days, an indicator of preparation, as they choose a suitable day. If anyone cuts off a wing of his, the swarm will not flee. When they have gone forth, each wants to be next to him and is glad to be seen at its duty. When he is tired they lift him on their shoulders; when more exhausted they carry him wholly. If any tired one has failed or has chanced to stray, he follows her by scent. Wherever he settles, there is the camp of all.

55| Then they make portents, private and public, hanging in a cluster in houses and temples, often expiated with great events. They settled on the mouth of the infant Plato as well, portending that sweetness of exceedingly sweet eloquence. They settled in the camp of the commander Drusus when a most successful battle was fought at Arbalo, by no means a constant interpretation of the haruspices, who think it always a dire omen. When the leader is seized the whole column is held,

56| when he is lost it dissolves and migrates to others. In any case they cannot be without a king. But they kill them reluctantly, when there are several of them, and rather pull down the houses of the newly born, if a yield is despaired of. Then they drive off the drones as well.

57| Although I see that even about these there is doubt, and some think they are a proper kind of their own, as with the thieves, the largest among them, but black and with a broad belly, so called because they devour honey by stealth. It is certain that drones are killed by the bees. They have no king in any case. And how they are born without a sting is a matter of inquiry.

58| In a damp spring the brood is better, in a dry the honey more abundant; but if food has failed some hives, they make an attack on the nearest with the purpose of plunder. But the others in turn draw up a line, and if a keeper is present, whichever party has felt that he favors it does not attack him. From other causes too they often fight and form two opposing armies and two commanders, chiefly when a quarrel breaks out in gathering flowers and each calls out its own; this fighting is wholly dispersed by throwing dust or by smoke, but is reconciled with milk or honeyed water.

59| There are bees also rustic and of the woods, rough in look, much more irascible, but outstanding in work and labor. Of the city bees there are two kinds: the best are short and varied and compact into roundness, the worse long and resembling wasps, still worse of these the hairy ones. In Pontus there are certain white ones that make honey twice a month, and about the river Thermodon two kinds, some that make honey in trees, others under the ground, with a threefold order of waxes, of most abundant yield. Nature gave bees a sting, joined to the belly for a single blow.

60| Some think that when this is fixed in, they die at once; some, not unless it is driven in so far that something of the intestine follows, but that afterward they are drones and do not make honey, as with strength unmanned, and cease alike to harm and to benefit.

61| There is on record a horse killed by them. They hate foul smells and flee far from them, but also from artificial ones; and so they attack those smelling of unguents. They themselves are liable to the injuries of very many animals. Wasps and hornets, degenerate of the same nature, assail them, and also of the gnat kind those called muliones. Swallows ravage them and certain other birds. Frogs lie in wait for them when they fetch water, which is their greatest work at the time when they are making offspring;

62| nor only those which beset pools and streams, but toads too come of their own accord and, creeping to the doors, blow at the gates: a sentinel flies out at this and is at once snatched away. Frogs are reported not to feel the bees' stings. Sheep too are hostile, since the bees extricate themselves from their wool with difficulty. They are killed even by the smell of crabs, if anyone cooks them near.

63| Indeed they feel diseases too by their own nature. The sign is a dull sadness, and when, brought out before the doors into the warmth of the sun, some offer food to the others, when they carry out the dead and accompany the funeral in the manner of mourners.

64| When the king is lost to this plague, the common crowd mourns with listless grief, not bringing food, not going forth; they only cluster with a sad murmur around his body. So the body is taken away once the crowd has been drawn off. Others, looking at the lifeless body, do not lessen the mourning; then too, unless help is brought, they die of hunger. Health is therefore judged by cheerfulness and sleekness. There are diseases of work also: when they do not fill the combs, they call it claron; likewise blapsigonia, if they do not complete the brood.

65| Hostile also is the echo, with a resounding sound, which strikes the frightened ones with alternate beat; hostile also fog. Spiders too are especially hostile: when they have gained enough strength to spin their web, they destroy the hives. The moth also, this lazy and unhonored creature, flitting up to lights that are lit, is a pest, and not in one way: for it both feeds on the waxes and leaves droppings from which wood-worms are produced; it also covers with spider-like threads wherever it has crawled, chiefly from the down of its wings.

66| Wood-worms too are born in the very wood, which seek wax especially. Greed of feeding is also a plague, too great a surfeit of flowers, in the spring season especially, with loose bowels. By oil not only bees but all insects are killed, above all if, with the head anointed, they are set in the sun.

67| Sometimes they themselves bring on causes of death for themselves, when they have sensed that the honey is being taken out, devouring it greedily, though otherwise they are sparing and would drive out prodigal and gluttonous bees just as they do idle and slothful ones. Their own honey also harms them, and smeared on from the rear they die. To so many enemies, so many chances — and what portion of them do I mention? — is so generous an animal exposed. We shall give the remedies in their places; for now the discourse is on nature.

68| They delight in clapping and the tinkling of bronze, and are called together by it. By which it is clear that the sense of hearing also is in them. When the work is done and the brood led out, their whole duty finished, they still have a customary exercise, ranging in the open and borne aloft, making circles in flight, and only then return to food.

69| Their longest life, if hostile and chance events turn out favorably, is seven years. Whole hives are reported never to have lasted beyond ten years. There are some who think that dead bees, if kept indoors in winter, then dried in the spring sun and warmed with lukewarm fig-wood ash, come back to life;

70| and that bees entirely lost can be restored by burying fresh ox bellies together with dung. Virgil says it is done with the dead body of young bullocks, just as wasps and hornets come from horses and scarab beetles from asses, nature changing certain creatures into others. But the mating of all these is observed, and yet in their offspring the nature is nearly the same as in bees.

71| Wasps make their nests high up out of mud, and in them their combs; hornets make theirs in hollows or underground. The cells of all of these are six-sided, but the combs are made of bark, like a spider's web. The brood itself is uneven, as with barbarians: one flies out, another is in the pupa, another in the grub, and all of this happens in autumn, not spring. They grow most at the full moon.

72| The wasps called ichneumones, which are smaller than the others, kill one kind of spider, called the phalangium, and carry it to their nests; then they plaster it over, and by brooding on these they produce their own kind. Moreover, all of them eat flesh, unlike bees, which touch no carcass. But wasps hunt the larger flies, and after cutting off the head carry away the rest of the body.

73| The wild hornets live in hollows of trees; in winter they hide like the other insects; their life does not pass two years. Their sting is hardly ever without fever. Authorities say that a man is killed by three times nine stings. Of the others, which appear milder, there are two kinds: the workers, smaller in body, which die in winter, and the mothers, which last two years; these are also gentle.

74| In spring they make nests, generally with four doors, in which the workers are to be generated. When these have been brought out, they then fashion other, larger nests, in which they bring forth the future mothers; at that point the workers perform their duty and feed them. The appearance of the mothers is broader, and it is doubtful whether they have stings, because they do not come out. They also have their own drones. Some hold that in all of these the stings fall off towards winter. Neither the race of hornets nor that of wasps has kings or swarms, but their multitude is continually renewed by offspring.

75| Among these there is a fourth kind, that of the bombyces, which arises in Assyria and is larger than those mentioned above. They fashion nests of mud in the shape of salt, attached to a stone, of such hardness that they can scarcely be pierced with darts. In these they make more wax than bees do, and then a larger grub.

76| And their origin is different. From a larger grub, putting out two horns of its own kind, there comes a urica, then what is called a bombylis, from this a necydallus, and from this in six months a bombyx. They weave webs in the manner of spiders, for women's clothing and luxury, which is called bombycina. The first to discover how to unravel them and weave them again was a woman on Cos, Pamphile, daughter of Plateas, who must not be cheated of the glory of devising a method for making women's clothes lay them bare.

77| They report that bombyces are also born on the island of Cos, from the blossom of the cypress, terebinth, ash and oak, shaken down by rains, with the breath of the earth giving it life. They say that at first they become small, naked butterflies, and soon, unable to endure the cold, they bristle with hairs and make themselves thick coats against winter, scraping the downy fluff of leaves with the roughness of their feet. This, they say, is gathered by them into fleeces and worked by combing with their claws, then drawn out into threads, thinned as if by a comb, and afterwards, taken up, is wrapped about the body in a rolling nest;

78| then it is taken away by man and the creatures are fed in earthenware vessels, with warmth and a food of bran, and thus feathers of their own kind grow upon them, and clothed in these they are sent off to other tasks. Those that have been caught for their wool grow soft with moisture, and are soon drawn out into threads on a rush spindle. And men have not been ashamed even to use these garments, for the sake of summer lightness: so far have manners departed from wearing a breastplate that even clothing is a burden. The Assyrian bombyx, however, we still leave to women.

79| To these may not unfittingly be joined the nature of spiders, worthy of special admiration. There are many kinds, and there is no need to describe them, since they are so well known. Those are called phalangia among them whose bites are harmful, with a small body, spotted and pointed, advancing by leaps. A second species of them is black, with the front legs very long. All have three joints in their legs.

80| The smallest of the lupi do not weave; the larger ones weave on the ground and spread small forecourts before their hollows. A third kind of them is conspicuous for its skilled work. It sets up webs, and its own belly supplies the material for so great a work, whether the nature of the belly is so spoiled at a fixed time, as Democritus holds, or there is some wool-bearing fertility within: with so measured a claw, so smooth and so even a thread does it draw out the warp, using its own weight.

81| It begins to weave from the middle, joining the weft in a circular course, and, widening the meshes at always equal intervals, but gradually growing from narrow, it fastens them with an indissoluble knot. With what art it hides the snares that run out from its checkered net! How the closely combed texture of the web seems to have no bearing on this, and the plan of the weft, firm of itself by a kind of polishing art! How yielding to breezes, and to what must not be refused as it comes, is the hollow of it!

82| You might think that the threads left over are stretched across the top in her weariness; but they are hard to make out, and, as in nets, the lines, when struck, throw the prey down into the hollow. And the den itself, with what architecture it is vaulted! And how much shaggier against the cold! How far it lies from the middle, and like a place intended for something else, yet so closed in that it cannot be seen whether anyone is inside or not! Consider its strength, when the winds break against it, when a mass of dust weighs it down!

83| The breadth of the web is often between two trees, when she practices her art and learns to weave; the length of the thread runs from the top and back again to the ground, and along that very thread she moves swiftly to and fro, rising and drawing down threads at once. But when a catch falls in, how watchful and ready is her rush! However far off at the edge the prey sticks, she always runs to the middle, because by shaking the whole she entangles it most. If the web is torn, she at once repairs it, mending it to its former smoothness.

84| For they even hunt the young of lizards, first wrapping the web about the mouth and only then seizing both lips with a bite, a spectacle fit for an amphitheater, when it happens. There are also omens from them. For when a rise of rivers is to come, they lift their webs higher. They weave in fair weather and unweave in cloudy, and so many cobwebs are a sign of rain. They think it is the female that weaves and the male that hunts; thus the services in their union are equal.

85| Spiders mate rump to rump and bring forth grubs like eggs; for their generation cannot be treated separately, since there is hardly any other method among insects. All of them, moreover, lay in the web, but scattered, because they leap and so discharge them. Only the phalangia brood in the den itself a great number, which, as soon as it has emerged, devours the mother, often the father also; for he helps in brooding. They lay as many as three hundred, the others fewer, and brood for three days. Spiders reach maturity in four times seven days.

86| In like manner to these, the land scorpions also bring forth grubs in the form of eggs and likewise perish, an untimely plague, with the poisons of serpents, except that by a heavier punishment they finish their victims by a slow death over three days; their sting is always deadly to virgins, and almost entirely so to women, but to men in the morning, when the scorpions go out of their holes before they have discharged their poison on some chance stroke while fasting.

87| The tail is ever poised to strike, and at no moment does it cease to rehearse, lest it ever fail an opportunity; it strikes with a sidelong blow and with a bent one. Apollodorus is the authority that a white poison is discharged by them, and he divides them into nine kinds by colors, most needlessly, since there is no way to know which he has declared least deadly. He says that some have double stings, and that the males are the fiercest, for he attributes mating to them, and that they are recognized by slenderness and length.

88| All have poison at midday, when they have become white-hot in the burning of the sun, and likewise, when they are thirsty, they cannot drink their fill. It is agreed also that those with seven joints in the tail are more savage; for most have six. This evil of Africa the south winds also make winged, lifting them as they spread their arms like oars; Apollodorus says plainly that some have wings.

89| Often the Psylli, who, bringing in the poisons of other lands, filled Italy with foreign evils for the sake of their gain, tried to import these too, but they could not live within the region of the Sicilian sky. They are nevertheless seen at times in Italy, but harmless, and in many other places, as around Pharus in Egypt.

90| In Scythia they kill even swine, which are otherwise more resistant to such poisons, the black ones indeed more quickly, if they have plunged into water. For a man who has been stung, the remedy is thought to be their own ash drunk in wine. They think that those drowned in oil, and stellions, are a great adversary, the latter harmless at least to those which themselves lack blood, being of the form of lizards; likewise scorpions do no harm at all to any creatures which have no blood.

91| Some think that their young are devoured by the parents themselves; that only one, the most cunning, is left, who, by placing himself on the very rump of his mother, is made safe from both tail and bite; that he is the avenger of the rest, who finally destroys his parents from above. They are born eleven at a time. The stelliones, after a fashion, have the nature of chameleons, living only on dew, and besides on spiders.

92| Similar is the life of cicadas, of which there are two kinds: the smaller, which appear first and perish last; they are mute. Next comes the flight of those that sing; they are called achetae, and the smaller of these, tettigonia. But the former are more tuneful. The males sing in both kinds, the females are silent. Peoples in the east eat them, even the Parthians, with their abundant means. Before mating they prefer the males, after mating the females, which are spoiled by their eggs, which are white.

93| They mate lying on their backs. There is a very sharp roughness on the back, with which they hollow out a place in the earth for their offspring. At first there is a grub, then from it what is called the tettigometra, whose shell they break about the solstices and fly out, always by night, at first black and hard. This is the one among living creatures that is also without a mouth; in place of it is a certain thing like the tongues of stinging insects, and this in the breast, with which they lick up dew. The breast itself is tubular. With this the achetae sing, as we shall say. For the rest there is nothing in the belly.

94| When roused and flying up, they let out moisture, which is the only proof that they are fed on dew. They alone have no opening for the body's waste. Their eyes are so dull that if someone draws near contracting and relaxing a finger, they pass by as though a leaf were playing. Some make two other kinds of them: the surcularia, which is larger, and the frumentaria, which others call avenaria, for it appears at the same time as the drying grain.

95| Cicadas are not born where trees are scarce, which is why there are none at Cyrene except around the town, nor in plains nor in cold or shadowy groves. There is also a certain difference of places for these. In the territory of Miletus they are in few places, but in Cephallania a certain river divides their scarcity from their abundance. And in the territory of Rhegium all are silent, while beyond the river, in the Locrian country, they sing. The nature of their wings is that of bees, but larger in proportion to the body.

96| Among insects, moreover, some bear two wings, as flies do, some four, as bees. Cicadas also fly on membranes. Those armed with stings in the belly have four. No creature whose weapon is in the mouth flies with more than two wings. For to the former it was given for revenge, to the latter for greed. In none of them do wings grow again once torn off. None that has a sting in the belly has two wings.

97| In some a crust grows over the wings as protection, as in scarabaei, whose wing is thinner and more fragile. A sting is denied them, but in a certain large kind of them there are very long horns, forked, with toothed pincers at the tip which close for a bite when it pleases them; these are even hung from the neck as remedies for infants. Nigidius calls them lucavi.

98| There is another kind of them again, which roll huge balls out of dung, backing and using their feet, and nestle in these their young, small grubs, against the harshness of winter. Others fly about with a great humming or lowing, others hollow out hearths and meadows with many holes, noisy with a shrill sound at night. The lampyrides shine at night like fires by the color of their sides and rumps, at one moment gleaming with the gaping of their wings, at another shadowed when they are pressed together; they are not conspicuous before the pastures are ripe or after they are cut.

99| On the contrary, the cockroaches live as nurslings of darkness and flee the light, being begotten especially in the damp steam of baths. Of the same family, the reddish and very large scarabaei dig dry earth and fashion combs, like a small, hollow sponge, with a medicated honey. In Thrace, close by Olynthus, lies a small place in which this one creature dies, and for this reason it is called Cantharolethrus.

100| The wings of all insects are without a split. None has a tail except the scorpion. It alone of them has both arms and a sting in the tail; of the rest, some have a sting in the mouth, like the asilus, or tabanus if one prefers to say so, likewise the gnat and some flies, and in all of these it is in the mouth and serves in place of a tongue. In some these stings are blunt and are not for piercing but for sucking, as in the kind of flies, in which the tongue is a plain tube. Nor do such creatures have teeth. In others small horns, idle, are held out in front of the eyes, as in butterflies. Some insects lack wings, as the scolopendra.

101| Insects that have feet move them sideways. In some, the last pair, longer, curve outward, as in locusts. These lay, with the stalk of the spine let down into the earth, eggs packed closely, in the autumn. They last through the winter; the following year, at the coming out of spring, they send small ones out of the earth, blackish, creeping without legs or wings. And so in a wet spring the eggs perish; in a dry spring the yield is greater.

102| Others report a double brood of them and a double destruction: that they lay when the Pleiades rise, then die when the Dog Star rises, and that others are born again; some say they are born again at the setting of Arcturus. It is certain that the mothers die when they have laid, a grub immediately growing around the throat which strangles them. At the same time the males perish. And though dying for so trifling a reason, single ones kill a serpent when they please, seizing its throat with their teeth. They are not born except in places full of cracks.

103| In India they are said to be three feet in length, and their legs and thighs, when dried, are used as saws. There is another death for them too: lifted in flocks by the wind, they fall into the seas or pools. This happens by chance and accident, and not, as the men of old supposed, because night dew has wetted their wings. For the same writers also reported that they do not fly at night because of the cold, not knowing that they even cross far seas, going without food for several days together (which should astonish us most) — the very hunger on account of which, as they know, they seek pasture abroad.

104| This plague is understood to be the wrath of the gods. For they are seen larger than usual, and they fly with such a whirring of wings that they are believed to be [other] birds, and they overshadow the sun while the peoples anxiously watch lest they cover their lands. For their strength suffices, and, as if it were little to have crossed the seas, they traverse immense tracts and cover the harvests with a dreadful cloud, burning much by their touch, and eating away everything with their bite, even the doors of houses.

105| They invade Italy chiefly when they have risen from Africa, and often the Roman people, for fear of want, have been forced to take refuge in the Sibylline remedies. In the region of Cyrenaica there is even a law to make war on them three times a year: first by crushing the eggs, then the young, and lastly the adults, with the penalty of a deserter on anyone who has been slack.

106| And on the island of Lemnos a fixed measure has been prescribed, which each person must bring to the magistrates of locusts killed. They also honor jackdaws for this reason, which meet them in opposing flight to their destruction. In Syria, too, people are compelled to kill them by military authority. So many parts of the world does this evil range over. Among the Parthians these also are welcome as food.

107| Their voice seems to proceed from the back of the head. In that place, at the joint of the shoulder blades, they are thought to have something like teeth, and by rubbing these together to produce the shrill sound, chiefly around the two equinoxes, as cicadas do around the solstice. The mating of locusts is that of all insects that mate: the female carries the male, the tip of the female's tail is bent back toward him, and the parting is slow. In all this kind the males are smaller than the females.

108| Most insects produce a grub; for ants also produce one like an egg in spring, [….] and these share their labor as bees do, but the bees make food, the ants store it. And if anyone compares the loads with their bodies, he would admit that none has greater strength in proportion. They carry them in their jaws; heavier ones they move backwards with the hind feet, straining with the shoulders. They also have a system of public affairs, memory, and care.

109| They gnaw the seeds they store, so that they may not sprout again from the earth; the larger ones they divide at the entrance; when wetted by rain they bring them out and dry them. They work by night too, at full moon, and cease at the moon's dark. Then in the work, what labor, what diligence! And since they bring in from different directions, one ignorant of another, fixed days are given as market days for mutual recognition.

110| What a running about of them there is then, and how careful a conversation and questioning of some with those they meet! We see flints worn by their journeys and a path made by their work, so that no one may doubt what even the smallest persistence can do in anything. Alone of living creatures besides man they bury one another. In Sicily they are not winged.

111| The horns of Indian ants, fixed up in the temple of Hercules at Erythrae, were a marvel. These ants brought gold out of their burrows in the earth, in the region of the northern Indians who are called Dardae. They are the color of cats and the size of Egyptian wolves. This gold, dug up by them in winter, the Indians steal in the heat of summer, when the ants have hidden in their tunnels because of the warmth; yet, roused by the scent, they dash out and often tear to pieces the thieves, though they flee on very swift camels. Such is their speed and fierceness together with their love of gold.

112| Many insects, moreover, are born otherwise also, and first of all from dew. This settles on the leaf of the radish in early spring and, thickened by the sun, is compacted to the size of a millet seed. From this a small grub stretches out, and in three days soon an uruca, which grows with added days, motionless, in a hard shell. It moves only at a touch, grown over with a spider's web, and they call it a chrysallis. Then, when the shell is broken, a butterfly flies out.

113| So some are generated from rain upon the earth, some also in wood. For not only cossi but also tabani are born from it, and others too, wherever there is excessive moisture, as within man tapeworms thirty feet long, and sometimes of greater length.

114| Then in lifeless flesh, and in the flesh and hair of living men too, from which foulness both the dictator Sulla and Alcman, among the most famous poets of Greece, died. This even plagues birds, and it kills pheasants unless they dust themselves;

115| of animals with hair, only the ass is believed immune to this evil, and sheep. They are also bred in a kind of clothing, especially woolen, in sheep killed by wolves. I find in authors also that certain waters in which we bathe are more fertile in creatures of this sort, since even wax breeds what is thought the smallest of animals. Others again are generated from the filth of dry soil, the petauristae, tumbling by the frisky play of their hind legs, others winged from damp dust in caves.

116| There is an animal of the same season, living with its head always fixed in blood and so swelling. It is the one animal that has no outlet for its food, and it bursts in excessive fullness, dying of the nourishment itself. It is never produced in beasts of burden, is frequent in oxen, sometimes in dogs, in which all kinds occur; in sheep and goats only this one. Equally marvelous is the thirst for blood of leeches in marsh water; for these too bury their whole head. There is a winged evil peculiar to dogs, mostly tearing the ears, which they cannot defend by biting.

117| The same dust creates moths in wools and clothing, especially if a spider is shut in with them. For being thirsty and absorbing all moisture, it increases the dryness. This is born also in papers. There is a kind of them dragging their coats after them, in the manner of snails; but their feet are seen. When stripped they expire.

118| If they have grown up, they make a chrysallis. The wild fig produces the fig gnats; the cantharides come from the grubs of figs and of the pear, the pine, the cynacantha and the rose. This poison has its remedies with it: the wings are a cure, and once they are removed it is deadly. Other kinds of gnats again are produced by a souring nature, since in old snow also are found reddish grubs, for snow itself reddens with age, rough with hair; in Media indeed they are white, larger and sluggish.

119| Even the element that is the enemy of nature produces some creatures. For in the copper furnaces of Cyprus, in the middle of the fire, there flies a winged four-footed creature of the size of a larger fly; it is called pyrallis, by some pyrotocon. As long as it is in the fire, it lives; when it has escaped by a somewhat longer flight, it dies.

120| The river Hypanis in the Pontus, about the solstice, brings down thin membranes in the shape of grapes, from which a winged four-footed creature bursts out, like the one mentioned above, and lives no longer than one day, whence it is called hemerobion. In the rest of such creatures the numbers are sevens from beginning to end: for the gnat and for grubs three times seven, for those bearing a body four times seven; the changes and passages into other shapes take three or four days. The other winged ones among them generally die in autumn by a wasting of the wings, the tabani even by blindness. Flies killed by moisture, if buried in ashes, return to life.

121| Now let the account be treated limb by limb, part by part of the body, apart from what has already been said. All that have blood have a head. On the head, in few animals and only in birds, there are crests, of different kinds: in the phoenix a tuft of feathers rising from the middle of it, in peacocks little shrubs of hair, in the stymphalis a curl, in the pheasant little horns, and besides in a small bird which, once called galerita from that, afterwards under the Gallic word alauda even gave its name to a legion.

122| We have said also to which bird nature gave a folding crest. Along the middle of the head from the beak she gave a crest to the kind of coots as well, curls to the woodpecker of Mars and to the Balearic crane, but the most distinguished ornament belongs to the barnyard fowl: fleshy, serrated; and we could not rightly say it is flesh or cartilage or callus, but something peculiar granted. As for the crests of dragons, no one is found who has seen them.

123| Horns have been given to many, both of water creatures and of sea creatures and of serpents, in various ways, but those rightly understood as horns belong only to the race of four-footed animals; for Actaeon and Cipus, even in Latin history, I take to be fabulous. Nowhere else is nature's playfulness greater. She played with the weapons of animals; she scattered them into branches, as in stags; to others she gave them single, as in the same kind to the subulones, named from the evidence; of others she spread them out into palms and sent fingers out from them, whence they are called platycerotes. She gave branching ones to roe deer,

124| but small, and did not make them shed, and twisted in a coil for the race of rams, as if to give them boxing-gloves, menacing ones to bulls; in this kind she gave them to females too, whereas in many kinds only to males; to wild goats curved backward over the back, to fallow deer curved forward; but upright, twisted in a circuit of ridges and sharpened to a smooth tip, as though fitted for lyres, in the strepsiceros, which Africa calls addax;

125| the same movable, like ears, in the herds of Phrygia; in those of the Trogodytae directed to the ground, for which reason they graze with the neck turned sideways; in others single, and this in the middle of the head or on the nose, as we have said. In some they are strong for charging, in others for striking, in others hooked, in others bent back, in others for tossing in several ways, upturned, convex, turned aside, all blackening to a point. In a certain kind they serve in place of hands for scratching the body, and in snails for feeling the way ahead; these are fleshy, as in the cerastes; in these sometimes single, in snails always two, so that they extend and spring back.

126| The barbarians of the northern lands drink out of urus horns and fill the two horns of a single head by the urnful; others tip spear shafts fixed with them to make points. Among us they are cut into plates and are translucent, and even spread a light shut inside them more widely, and they are applied to many other luxuries, now dyed, now coated, now of the sort called cestrota, a kind of painting.

127| (All have them hollow and solid only at the tip, except in stags, whose horns are wholly solid and shed every year) farmers cure the worn hooves of oxen by anointing the horns with fat, and the substance is so pliant that, in the living bodies themselves, they can be bent with hot wax, and in the newborn twisted in different directions, so that single heads come to have four horns.

128| In females they are mostly thinner, as in many of the flock; in sheep none, nor in does of stags; nor have those with many-cleft feet, nor any of the solid-hoofed, except the Indian ass, which carries one horn as its weapon. To cloven-footed animals nature gave two, to none having upper front teeth. Those who think that these are used up into horns are easily refuted by the nature of does, which have neither teeth (as the males do not either) nor yet horns. In the rest they adhere to the bones; in stags alone they grow out of the skin.

129| Fish have heads in the largest proportion of the body, perhaps that they may dive. To the race of oysters there are none, nor to sponges nor generally to others in which touch is the only one of the senses. In some the head is not distinguished, as in crabs.

130| Of all animals man has the most hair on the head, now indeed alike in males and females, at least among unshorn peoples. And even names come from it: the Capillati, inhabitants of the Alps, and Gallia Comata, though there is some difference in this between lands. For the Myconians are born without it, as in Caunus the spleen-sufferers. And certain animals are naturally bald, as ostriches and water ravens, whence their name among the Greeks.

131| Its falling out is rare in a woman, not seen in eunuchs, nor in anyone before the use of Venus, nor below the brain or below the crown or about the temples and ears. Of animals man alone has baldness, other than the inborn kind. Gray hair is found only in man and the horse, but in man always from the front part of the head, then afterwards from the back. Only some men have two crowns.

132| The bones of the head are flat and thin, without marrow, built with joints serrated like a comb. When broken through they cannot be made solid again, but when moderately removed they are not fatal, a fleshy scar taking their place. We have said in their place that they are weakest in bears and hardest in parrots.

133| All animals that have blood have a brain, and in the sea those we have called soft, although they lack blood, as the polypus. But man's is the largest in proportion and the moistest, and the coldest of all the viscera, covered by two membranes above and below, either of which, if ruptured, is fatal. Otherwise, in the male it is larger than in the female, in all it is without blood, without veins, and in the tallow-bearing animals without fat.

134| The learned teach that it is something other than marrow, since it hardens in cooking. In the middle of the brain of all there are small bones. In man alone it throbs in infancy and is not strengthened before the first beginning of speech.

135| This is the highest of the viscera [….] the vault of the head, without flesh, without blood, without filth. The senses have this as their citadel; hither the whole force of the veins tends from the heart, here it ends, this is the loftiest summit, here is the governance of the mind. In all animals it inclines forward, because the senses also stretch ahead of us. From it sleep proceeds, hence the nodding of the head. Creatures that have no brain do not sleep. In stags, it is reported, there are worms in the head, under the hollow of the tongue and about the joint where the head is joined, to the number of 20.

136| Ears are immobile only in man. From these come the surnames of the Flacci. Nor in any other part is there greater expense for women than in pearls hanging down; in the East indeed even men think it an ornament to wear gold in that place. In animals some have them larger, some smaller; in stags alone they are split and as if divided, in the shrew hairy, but all that bring forth live young have ears of some sort, except the seal and the dolphin, and those we called cartilaginous, and vipers:

137| these have only cavities in place of ears, apart from the cartilaginous fish and the dolphin, which nevertheless plainly hears. For it is soothed by song and is caught, stupefied by sound. How they hear is a wonder. The same have no trace of a nose either, though they smell most keenly. Of winged creatures, only the eagle owl and the horned owl have feathers like ears, the others have cavities for hearing; likewise the scaly creatures and serpents. In horses and every kind of beasts of burden the ears show the signs of the mind: drooping in the weary, quivering in the fearful, pricked up in the furious, relaxed in the sick.

138| A face is for man only; the rest have a mouth or a snout. The brow exists in others too, but in man alone it is an index of sadness, cheerfulness, gentleness, severity. In its upper part are a man's eyebrows, movable both together and alternately. In these too is a part of the mind: by them we refuse, by them we assent. They chiefly show disdain and pride. Elsewhere there is a receptacle of pride, but here it has its seat; it is born in the heart, comes up to here, hangs here. It found nothing higher and at the same time steeper in the body, where it might be solitary.

139| Beneath them lie the eyes, the most precious part of the body, which by the use of light distinguishes life from death. Not all animals have them; oysters have none, and in some shellfish they are doubtful. For scallops, if one moves his fingers against them as they gape, contract as if seeing, and razor-shells flee from approaching iron. Among four-footed animals moles have no sight; the likeness of eyes is there, if someone draws off the membrane stretched in front. And among birds, in the kind of herons, those they call leuci,

140| are said to lack one eye, and it is of the best augury when they fly to the south or north; for they say that dangers and fears are loosed. Nigidius says that locusts and cicadas have none. In snails two little horns fill the place of eyes by feeling ahead. Nor have earthworms any, nor any kind of worms.

141| Eyes in man alone are of different color; in the rest they are alike within each kind. In some horses they are bluish-grey, but in man they are of the most numerous variety and difference: larger, moderate, small; prominent, which they think duller, deep-set, which they think see most clearly, as also those of goat color.

142| Besides, some look at distant things, others see nothing unless held close. The sight of many is established by the brilliance of the sun, and they do not see on a cloudy day or after sunset. Others are duller by day and see by night beyond the rest. Of double pupils, and of those whose sight would be harmful, we have said enough. Grey eyes are clearer in darkness.

143| They say that Tiberius Caesar, and no other mortal born, had such a nature that, waking at night, for a short while he looked at everything not otherwise than in clear daylight, the darkness gradually closing in upon him. The deified Augustus had eyes bluish-grey like horses', with more white in them than a man's eyes have, for which reason he took it ill and angrily if they were looked at too closely;

144| Claudius Caesar had eyes at the corners, from a fleshy whiteness, repeatedly flooded with bloody veins; Gaius the emperor, rigid ones; Nero [….] dull, except when he screwed them up for things held close. There were 20,000 gladiators in the school of the emperor Gaius, and among them there were only two who did not blink before any threat, and for that reason were undefeated. So great a difficulty is this for man. In most people it is natural that they never cease blinking, and we have heard that these are the more fearful.

145| No eye is of one color; for all there is a common whiteness, and in the middle a differing color. And in no part are there greater signs of the mind in all animals, but especially in man, that is, of moderation, gentleness, pity, hatred, love, sadness, joy. In the gaze too they are of many forms: fierce, grim, blazing, heavy, sidelong, askance, lowered, caressing. Surely the mind dwells in the eyes.

146| they burn, they strain, they grow moist, they blink. Hence that tear of pity; when we kiss them, we seem to touch the very mind; hence the weeping and the streams that wet the face. What is that moisture, so fruitful in grief and so ready, and where is it at other times? But it is by the mind that we see, by the mind that we discern: the eyes, like certain vessels, receive the visible part of it and pass it on. So deep thought blinds, the sight being drawn inward. So in the falling sickness, when the mind darkens, people with open eyes see nothing.

147| Indeed hares sleep with eyes open, and many men, those the Greeks say are in Corybantic frenzy. Nature composed the eyes of many thin membranes, with hardened coats on the outside against cold and heat. These she keeps clean from time to time by the saliva of the tears, because they are slippery and mobile in the face of things rushing in.

148| In the middle of their orbs she cut a window, the pupil, whose narrowness does not let the uncertain sight wander but directs it as if through a channel, and things that happen to come in the way are easily avoided; around it are circles of black in some, of tawny in others, of grey in others, so that by a convenient mixture the light is received by the surrounding whiteness and, with its reflection tempered, does not clash. And so complete is the power of a mirror in them that this tiny pupil gives back the entire image of a human being. That is why most birds, when held in men's hands, go for the eyes above all, because seeing their own likeness in them they strive, as it were, toward their own kin.

149| Only certain beasts of burden feel diseases at the waxing of the moon. But man alone is freed from blindness by the drawing off of fluid. After the twentieth year sight has been restored to many; in some it was denied from birth with no fault of the eyes, and in many it was suddenly taken away in the same way without any previous injury. The most expert authorities report that veins run from the eyes to the brain; I should believe also to the stomach: at any rate no one has an eye torn out without an overflow from it.

150| To close them for the dying and open them again on the pyre is a sacred rite of the Quirites of great importance, established by custom in such a way that it is not lawful for the last sight of them to be seen by a man, and unlawful not to show them to the sky. Of animals, man alone has them distorted, whence the surnames Strabo and Paetus. Those among them who were born without one eye were called Cocles; those with both small, Ocellae; those who had lost an eye by injury had the surname Luscinus.

151| In nocturnal animals, such as cats, the eyes gleam and shine in the dark so that one cannot look at them; the goat and the wolf also have bright eyes and shoot out light. The eyes of seals and hyenas keep passing into a thousand colors. Even in the dark the eyes of many fish shine back, like dry sturdy logs and those rotten with age. We have said that those creatures do not blink which see not with sidelong eyes but by turning the head around.

152| They say the eyes of the chameleon are wholly turned round. Crabs look sideways, carrying their eyes enclosed in a fragile shell. In locusts and shrimps, for the most part, they project, very hard, under the same protection. Those whose eyes are hard see less than those whose eyes are moist. Of the young of serpents and the chicks of swallows, they say that if someone puts out their eyes, they grow again.

153| The eyes of all insects and of shell-covered creatures are movable, as the ears of four-footed animals. Those with fragile coverings have hard eyes. All such creatures, both fish and insects, have no eyelids and do not cover their eyes. Over them in all a membrane, transparent like glass, is stretched.

154| Man has eyelashes on both lids, in women even stained daily with dye: such is the striving after beauty that even the eyes are tinted. Nature had given them for another reason, as a kind of palisade of the sight and a projecting defense against creatures running at it or other things that fall upon it by chance. They say, not undeservedly, that they fall out in those who indulge excessively in Venus.

155| The rest have none, except those that have hairs on the remainder of their body; but four-footed animals have it only on the upper lid, birds on the lower, and also those with a soft hide, like serpents, and four-footed animals which lay eggs, like lizards. The ostrich alone among birds has eyelashes on both lids, like man.

156| Not even lids are possessed by all. Therefore there is no winking except in those that bring forth live young; the heavier birds close the eye with the lower lid, and the same wink from the corners, a membrane passing over. Doves and the like close both; but the four-footed that lay eggs, as tortoises and crocodiles, only the lower, without any winking, because of the very hard eyes.

157| The outer edge of the upper lid the ancients called cilium, whence also supercilia. This, when parted by some wound, does not grow together, as is the case in few members of the human body. Below the eyes are the cheekbones, in man only, which the ancients called genae, the interdict of the Twelve Tables forbidding women to scratch them. This is the seat of shame: there redness is chiefly displayed.

158| Below these are the cheeks, which show cheerfulness and laughter, and the higher nose, in man only, which newer manners have dedicated to crafty mockery. In no other animals do nostrils project: in birds, serpents and fish there are only openings for smelling, without nostrils, and hence the surnames Simi and Silones. In those born in the seventh month the openings of ears and nostrils have often been lacking.

159| The lips, from which the Brocchi and Labeones are named, and the mouth are good in those that bring forth live young, and rather hard. In place of these, birds have horny and sharp beaks, the same hooked in those that live by plunder, straight in those that gather, broad in those that root up herbs and mud, as also in the race of swine; in beasts of burden they serve in place of hands for gathering food. The mouths of those that live by tearing are more open. A chin is for no one except man, nor cheeks. The crocodile alone moves the upper jaw; land four-footed animals move it in the same way as the rest, and besides sideways.

160| There are three kinds of teeth: serrated, continuous, or projecting. Serrated ones close together like a comb, so that they are not worn down by meeting in opposition, as in serpents, fish, dogs; continuous, as in man, the horse; projecting, as in the boar, the hippopotamus, the elephant. Of the continuous, those which divide food are broad and sharp, those which finish it are double; those which separate them are called canine: these are the longest in the serrated.

161| Those that are continuous either run along both jaws of the mouth, as with the horse, or else lack front teeth in the upper jaw, as in oxen, sheep and all that chew the cud. Goats have no upper teeth except two front ones. None with serrated teeth has projecting ones; rarely females, and then without use. So when boars strike, the female swine bite.

162| No animal with horns has projecting teeth, but all have hollow ones; the rest have solid teeth. Of fish all have serrated, except the scarus; in this alone of water creatures they are flat. Moreover, in many of them there are teeth on the tongue and all over the mouth, so that by a crowd of wounds they soften what they cannot subdue by grinding, and in many on the palate [and even on the tail], besides turned toward the mouth, lest food fall out, since they have no means of holding it.

163| They are like those of the asp and serpents, but two in the upper part, right and left, very long, bored through with a slender tube, like the stings of scorpions, pouring in venom. The most careful authors write that this is nothing other than the gall of serpents, and that from it veins run under the spine to the mouth; some say there is one such tooth and that, because it is hooked, the snake turns on its back after biting; some that it then falls out and grows again, easily shaken off, and that those we see handled are without it. It is in the scorpion's tail, and in most there are three.

164| In vipers the teeth are hidden in the gums. The viper, pregnant with the same poison, pours out the venom in biting by the pressing back of the teeth. Of birds none has teeth, except the bat. The camel, one of those that are not horned, has no front teeth in the upper jaw. None of those that have horns has serrated teeth. Snails also have teeth. The proof is that vetch is gnawed even by the smallest of them.

165| But in marine creatures, that crustaceans and cartilaginous fish have front teeth, and that sea urchins have five, I wonder how it could have been learned. In place of teeth insects have a sting. Apes have teeth like man. The elephant has four inside for chewing, and besides these there project tusks, in males bent back, in females straight and pointing forward. The sea mouse, which goes before the whale, has none, but in place of them has a mouth bristling with hairs inside, and also the tongue and palate. Of small four-footed land animals, there are two front teeth on each side, very long.

166| In the rest they are born with the animal, in man after birth in the seventh month. In others they remain permanent; they are changed in man, lion, beast of burden, dog and ruminants, but in the lion and dog only those called canine. The right canine of the wolf is held to be of great efficacy. Molars, which come after the canines, no animal changes. In man the last, which are called genuine, are born about the twentieth year, in many at the eightieth, in women also, but in those in whom they were not born in youth.

167| It is certain that they fall out in old age and soon grow again. Zocles of Samothrace, whose teeth grew again after 103 years, was seen by Mucianus, who has reported it. Otherwise males have more than females, in man, sheep, goat, swine. Timarchus, son of Nicocles, at Paphos had two rows of molars; his brother did not change his front teeth and therefore wore them away. There is an example of a tooth born in a man even in the palate. Teeth lost from the canines by some accident never grow again. In the rest they turn reddish in old age; in the horse alone they grow whiter.

168| The age of beasts of burden is judged by the teeth. The horse has 40. At the thirtieth month it loses the two front teeth on each side, the next year as many next to them, when the so-called columellares come in; at the beginning of the fifth year it loses two, which grow again in the sixth year; in the seventh it has all of them, regrown and unchangeable.

169| In a gelded horse the teeth do not fall earlier. The race of asses loses them similarly at the thirtieth month, then at six-month intervals. If they have not foaled before the last ones fall, sterility is certain. Oxen change at two years. In swine they never fall. When this observation fails, old age in horses and other beasts of burden is recognized by projecting teeth, whitening of the eyebrows and hollows around them, when they are reckoned at about 16 years.

170| There is a certain venom in the teeth of men; for when bared they dim the brightness of a mirror held before them, and they kill unfeathered young doves. The rest about them has been said in the account of the generation of men. At their breaking through diseases seize the bodies of infants; the other animals that have serrated teeth cut them most painfully.

171| Tongues are not alike in all. The thinnest is in serpents, and three-forked, quivering, of dark color and, if you draw it out, very long; in lizards forked and hairy, and in seals also double, but of the hair-like thinness mentioned. In the rest it serves to lick around the mouth; in fish it adheres a little less than entirely, in crocodiles entirely; but for tasting, in place of the tongue, water creatures have a fleshy palate.

172| In lions, leopards and all of that kind, even cats, it is rough like overlapping scales and like a file, and by licking wears away the skin of man, which is the reason that even when tamed, once saliva reaches the neighboring blood, it provokes them to rage. We have spoken of the tongues of the purpurae.

173| In frogs the tongue is attached at the front, free at the back toward the throat, with which the males send out their voice when they are called ololygones. This happens at a fixed time, as they stir the females to mating. For then, with the lower lip let down to the level of the water, and a little water taken into the throat, the tongue quivers there and a wailing is squeezed out. Then the stretched pouches of the cheeks are translucent, and the eyes blaze, driven by the effort. Those with stings in the hind part have also teeth and a tongue, in bees even very long, and projecting in cicadas. Those that have a hollow sting in the mouth possess neither tongue nor teeth. In some insects the tongue is inside, as in ants; for the rest it is hidden, especially in the elephant.

174| In the rest it is always complete in its kind; in man alone it is so often bound by veins that they must be cut. We are told that the pontifex Metellus was so impeded in speech that he is believed to have been tormented for many months while he practised saying 'to Ops Opifera' for the dedication of her temple. In the others speech comes out about the seventh year. Many, however, have such a skill with it that an indiscriminate imitation of the voices of birds and animals is produced. In the rest the perception of flavors is in the front of the tongue; in man also in the palate.

175| Man has tonsils, the pig glands. What hangs between them at the end of the palate, under the name of uvula, is found in man only. Beneath it is a smaller tongue, in no creature that lays eggs. Its work is double, set between two pipes. The inner of these is called the arteria,

176| reaching to the lung and heart; this it covers during eating, while breath and voice pass through that one, lest if drink or food should stray into a foreign path, it should cause torment. The other, outer, may well be called the gula, by which food and drink fall down. It runs to the stomachus, and that to the belly. This it covers in turn when only breath or voice is passing, so that an untimely backflow from the belly may not interfere. The arteria consists of cartilage and flesh, the gula of sinew and flesh.

177| A cervix belongs to none except those which have both of these; the rest have a collum, those that have only the gula. But those that have a cervix, it is made flexible for looking around of many bones, vertebrate and round, and joined by knots of joints; only in the lion, wolf and hyena it is stiff with single straight bones.

178| For the rest it is joined to the spine, the spine to the loins, bony, but of rounded structure, with the marrow descending from the brain through the openings in the middle. They conclude that its nature is the same as the brain's, since if it is cut only through its very thin membrane the animal at once expires. Those with long legs have long necks, and likewise water birds, though they have short legs, and similarly hooked claws.

179| The throat swells in man only and in swine, mostly from a fault of the waters that are drunk. The upper end of the gula is called the fauces, the lower end the stomachus. By this name is meant the fleshy hollow beneath the arteria, attached to the spine, spread out in breadth and length like a flask.

180| Those that have no fauces have no stomachus either, nor neck, nor throat, as fish, and their mouths are joined to the belly. The sea tortoise has no tongue or teeth: it crushes everything with the edge of its beak. Afterwards the arteria and the stomachus, toothed with a callus in the manner of a bramble, for finishing the food, the notches diminishing toward whatever approaches the belly; the last part is rough like a smith's rasp.

181| In other animals the heart lies in the centre of the chest; in man alone it is below the left nipple, projecting forward with a spiral point. In fish alone it faces the mouth. They say this is the first thing formed in the newly conceived in the womb, then the brain, just as the eyes are formed most slowly, but these die first, the heart last. It has a special warmth. It certainly throbs and moves like a second animal within the animal, covered with a very soft and firm envelope of membrane, and protected by the wall of the ribs and breast, so that it may produce the chief cause and origin of life.

182| It gives a first dwelling within itself to the mind and blood, in a winding cavern, triple in large animals, double in all the rest. There the mind lives. From this source two great veins run to the front and back, and in a scattered series of branches, through others smaller, water all the members with the vital blood. This alone of the viscera is not wasted by diseases, and does not drag out the pains of life; when injured it brings death at once. When the rest are corrupted, vitality remains in the heart.

183| Animals are thought dull in which it is hard and stiff, bold in which it is small, timid in which it is very large. In proportion it is largest in mice, the hare, ass, stag and panther, weasels, hyenas, and all that are timid or harmful through fear. In Paphlagonia partridges have two hearts. In the heart of horses and oxen bones are sometimes found.

184| The Egyptians, who have the custom of preserving embalmed corpses, hold that it increases in man each year, and that two drachmas are added to its weight up to the fiftieth year, and as much is taken off after that, and that for this reason a man does not live beyond the hundredth year, through failure of the heart.

185| It is reported that some men are born with a hairy heart, and that no others are of stronger energy, such as Aristomenes the Messenian, who killed three hundred Lacedaemonians. Himself wounded all over and captured once, he escaped through a cave of the stone quarries by the narrow ways, following the passage of foxes. Captured a second time, while the guards were asleep he rolled himself to the fire and burned through the thongs along with his body. When he was captured a third time, the Lacedaemonians cut open the chest of the living man, and the heart was found hairy.

186| At the top of the heart there is a certain fatness in favorable entrails. It was not always, however, counted among the parts of the entrails. In the time of Lucius Postumius Albinus, son of Lucius, the rex sacrorum, after the 126th Olympiad, once King Pyrrhus had left Italy, the haruspices began to inspect the heart in the entrails. For Caesar the dictator, on the day when he first went forth in a purple robe and sat on a golden chair, the heart was missing from the entrails when he sacrificed. Hence a great question about divination among those arguing whether the victim was able to live without that viscus or had lost it only for the time.

187| It is said that it cannot be burned in those who have died of heart disease, and also not in those killed by poison. At any rate there survives a speech of Vitellius in which he charges Gnaeus Piso with that crime, using this argument and openly testifying that the heart of Germanicus Caesar could not be burned on account of poison. Piso, on the other hand, was defended by the kind of disease.

188| Beneath the heart is the lung, the workshop of breathing, drawing in and giving back the breath, and therefore spongy and hollow with empty pipes. Few water creatures have it, as has been said; the others that lay eggs have a small one, frothy and bloodless. Therefore they do not thirst. This is also the reason why frogs and seals dive for long under water. The tortoise also, though it has a very large one under the whole covering, has it without blood. The smaller this is in bodies, the greater the speed. The chameleon has it largest in proportion and nothing else inside.

189| The liver lies on the right side, in what they call the head of the entrails, of great variety. For Marcus Marcellus, near his death, when he perished at the hands of Hannibal, it was missing in the entrails; on the next day a double one was found. It was missing for Gaius Marius when he sacrificed at Utica, likewise for the emperor Gaius on the Kalends of January when he entered on the consulship in the year he was killed, and for Claudius his successor in the month in which he was killed by poison.

190| For the deified Augustus, sacrificing at Spoletium on the first day of his power, the livers of six victims were found folded back inward from the lowest fibre, and the answer was given that he would double his empire within a year. A head of the entrails found cut is also a sad portent, except in times of anxiety and fear; for then it cuts away cares. Hares have two livers around Briletum and Tharne and in the Chersonese on the Propontis, and, a marvel, if carried elsewhere, one of them perishes.

191| In the same place is the gall, not given to all animals. At Chalcis in Euboea sheep have none; in Naxos it is very large and double, so that either is an omen to a stranger. Horses, mules, asses, stags, roe deer, boars, camels, dolphins do not have it. Some mice have it. In men few lack it, and those enjoy firm health and a longer life.

192| There are those who think that in the horse it is not in the liver but in the belly, and in the stag in the tail or in the intestines; and that these parts are therefore so bitter that dogs leave them untouched. It is nothing else than a refuse, and the worst of the blood, and for that reason in the matter of it. At any rate a liver belongs only to creatures that have blood. It receives this from the heart, to which it is joined, and pours it into the veins.

193| But in black gall lies the cause of madness in man, and death when all of it is brought up. Hence a charge against character too under the name of bile: so great is the venom in this part when it pours itself over the mind. Indeed, wandering through the whole body, it takes the color from the eyes as well, and indeed when it is brought up it does this even to bronze vessels, and things touched by it grow black, so that no one may wonder that it is the poison of serpents.

194| (Those that feed on absinthium in Pontus lack it.) But in birds it is attached by another part to the intestine in ravens, quails, pheasants; in some only to the intestine, as in doves, the hawk, the muraena; in few birds to the liver. In serpents it is most plentiful in proportion.

195| And in fish it is also along the whole intestine in most, as in the hawk and the kite; besides it is also in the liver, as in all cetaceans. In seals indeed it is famous for many uses. From the gall of bulls a golden color is obtained. The haruspices dedicated it to Neptune and the power of moisture, and it was double for the deified Augustus on the day he conquered at Actium.

196| In the little livers of mice, the fibres are said to agree with the number of the moon in the month, and as many are found as the moon's light is old, and besides to increase at midwinter. The entrails of rabbits in Baetica are often found double. In the frogs called rubetae, one lobe is not touched by ants, because of the poison, as they think. That the liver is the organ most able to bear age, lasting a hundred years each, the examples of sieges have recorded.

197| The entrails of serpents and lizards are long. It is related that to Caecina of Volaterrae snakes darted forth from the entrails, as a happy portent, and surely nothing will be incredible to those who consider that on the day King Pyrrhus died the severed heads of victims crawled, licking their own blood. In a human being the entrails are set apart from the lower viscera by a membrane which they call praecordia, because it is stretched in front of the heart, what the Greeks have called phrenes.

198| Nature, in her foresight, enclosed all the principal viscera in their own membranes, like sheaths; in this one there was a special reason as well, the neighborhood of the belly, lest the mind be oppressed by food. To this, at any rate, the subtlety of mind that we receive is ascribed; therefore it has no flesh, but a sinewy slenderness. In the same is the chief seat of cheerfulness, which is understood most from the tickling of the armpits, to which it rises, the human skin being thinner nowhere else and therefore the pleasure of scratching nearest there. For this reason in battles and gladiatorial shows pierced praecordia have brought death with laughter.

199| Below lies the belly in those that have a stomach; in the rest it is single, in ruminants double, in those lacking blood there is none. For in some the intestine beginning at the mouth is bent back to the same place, as in the cuttlefish and the polypus. In man it is joined to the lowest part of the stomach and is like the dog's. In these alone of animals it is narrower at the lower part; and so these alone vomit, because when it is full, food is held back by the narrowness, which cannot happen in those whose roomy looseness sends it on to the lower parts.

200| From this stomach come the lactes in the sheep and in man, through which the food glides, and in the others the hillae, from which the more capacious intestines lead to the belly, in man in the most winding coils. Therefore those are more greedy for food in which the distance from the belly is longer. Likewise those with the fattest belly are less clever. Some birds also have two pouches: one in which they swallow fresh food, like a throat, another into which they release it from the first when digestion is ripened, as hens, wood pigeons, doves, partridges.

201| Most of the others lack it but use a wider gullet, as jackdaws, ravens, crows. Some use neither, but have the belly close by, those with very long, narrow necks, as the porphyrio. The belly of solid-hoofed animals is rough and hard; in some land animals it has a toothed roughness, in others a latticed bite, in those that have teeth on neither side nor chew the cud. Here the food is finished, and from here it slips down into the lower belly.

202| The middle part of this, attached to the navel in all, in man like that of the pig in its lowest part, is called by the Greeks the colon, where there is a great cause of pains. It is narrowest in dogs, which is why they relieve it with violent effort and not without torture. Insatiable are the animals in which the food goes straight on from the stomach into a straight intestine, as the lupi cervarii, and among birds the diving birds.

203| The elephant has four stomachs, the rest like those of swine, the lung four times larger than an ox's. In birds the stomach is fleshy and callous. In the stomach of swallow chicks are found little stones of white or reddish color, which are called chelidonii, told of in the magical arts; and in the second stomach of heifers a blackish tuff of the roundness of a ball, without weight, a singular remedy, as they think, for women in difficult labor, if it has not touched the ground.

204| The stomach and the intestines are covered by a fatty and thin omentum, except in those that lay eggs. To this is attached the spleen on the left side, opposite the liver, with which it sometimes changes its place, but as a prodigy. Some think it is present in those that lay eggs, and likewise in serpents, quite small. So at any rate it is seen in the tortoise and crocodile and lizards and frogs. It is agreed that it is not found in the aegocephalus bird, nor in those that lack blood.

205| A peculiar hindrance to running is sometimes in it, for which reason it is reduced in racers who suffer from it. And they report that animals live even when it is taken out through a wound. There are those who think that laughter is taken away with it in man, and that his lack of restraint depends on the size of the spleen. A region of Asia is called Scepsis, in which they say flocks have the smallest, and that remedies for the spleen are brought from there.

206| But at Briletum and Tharne stags have four kidneys each; on the contrary, winged and scaly creatures have none. For the rest, they are attached to the uppermost part of the loins. The right in all is higher and less fatty and drier. In each the fat comes out from the middle, except in the seal. Animals are fattest about the kidneys; sheep in fact die when the fat gathers thickly around them. Sometimes little stones are found in them. All four-footed animals that bring forth live young have kidneys; of egg-layers the tortoise alone, which has all the other viscera too, but, like man, it has them similar to those of oxen, as though composed of many kidneys.

207| The breast, that is the bones, nature placed around the praecordia and vital parts, but took them from the belly, which had to grow: in no animal are there bones around the belly. Only man has a broad breast; in the rest it is keeled, more so in birds, and among them most in the water birds. Man has eight ribs on each side, swine ten, horned animals 13, serpents 30.

208| Below the belly, in the front part, is the bladder, which none of the egg-layers has except the tortoise, nor any that does not have a bloody lung, nor any lacking feet. Between it and the belly run vessels reaching to the groin, which are called ilia. In the wolf's bladder there is a small stone named syrites, but in some men there are stones continually born with dreadful torture, and hair-like threads of bristle. The bladder consists of a membrane which, when wounded, does not close with a scar, nor does that which wraps the brain or heart; for there are several kinds of membranes.

209| Females have all the same, and besides a little bag joined to the bladder, whence it is called uterus. This, which by another name they call loci, is called volva in the other animals; this in the viper, and in those that give birth within themselves, is double; in egg-layers it is attached to the praecordia, and in a woman it has twin pouches on each side of the flanks, deadly whenever it is turned and shuts in the breath.

210| They deny that cows carry a pregnancy except in the right pouch of the volva, even when they bear twins. The volva of a sow that has cast her litter is better than that of one that has given birth: the one is called eiecticia, the other porcaria. The best is of a sow with her first litter, the worst of those worn out. After farrowing, except on the same day, it is livid and lean when the sow is killed.

211| Nor is that of young sows approved, except those with a first litter, but rather of old ones, provided they are not worn out, nor two days before farrowing nor after farrowing nor on the day they have cast the litter. Nearest to the eiecticia is that of a sow killed one day after farrowing. Its udder too is best, provided the young have not drawn upon it; that of the eiecticia is the worst. The ancients called the abdomen so before it grew callous, not being accustomed to kill pregnant sows.

212| Horned animals, toothed on one side, and those that have ankle bones in the feet, grow fat with tallow; cloven-footed animals, or those with feet split into toes and not horned, with lard. This is hard and, when it has cooled, brittle, and always at the edge of the flesh; the fat between flesh and skin, on the other hand, is liquid with juice. Some do not grow fat, as the hare and partridge. All fat animals, both males and females, are more sterile; they also age faster when very fat. All animals have a certain fat in the eyes.

213| Lard is without feeling in all, because it has neither arteries nor veins. In most animals the fat too is without feeling; which is why they say swine were gnawed by mice while still breathing, and indeed that fat was removed from the son of Lucius Apronius, a man of consular rank, and his body relieved of an immovable burden.

214| Marrow seems to be of the same stuff, red in youth, whitening in old age. It is only in hollow bones, not in the shin bones of beasts of burden or dogs; which is why they are not welded when broken, because the marrow flows out. It is fatty in those that have lard, tallowy in horned animals, sinewy in the spine alone of the back in those that have no bones, such as the race of fishes; bears have none, and in the lion there is very little, in a few bones of the thighs and arms; the rest are of such hardness that fire is struck out of them as from flint.

215| And in those that do not grow fat they are hard; those of asses are tuneful for making pipes. Dolphins have bones, not spines, for they bring forth live young; serpents have spines. The soft water creatures have none, but a body bound with circles of flesh, as the cuttlefish and squid. And insects are said to have none either. The cartilaginous water creatures have marrow in the spine; seals have cartilage, not bones.

216| Likewise the ears and nostrils of all, which merely project, are of pliant softness, by the foresight of nature, that they should not be broken. Cartilage once broken does not become solid, nor do severed bones grow again, except in beasts of burden from the hoof to the pastern [….]. Man grows in length up to three times seven years, then afterwards to fullness. But especially at puberty a certain knot is felt to be loosened, and chiefly through sickness.

217| The sinews, beginning from the heart and even wound around the ox's, have a similar nature and cause, attached to all the slippery bones, and binding the knots of the body, which are called joints, in one place by intervening, in another by encircling, in another by passing through, here round, there broad, as each shape requires.

218| Nor do these become solid when cut, and, a marvel, the pain is greatest when they are wounded, none when they are severed. Some animals are without sinews, as fish, for they consist of arteries; but neither have the soft creatures of the race of fishes. Where there are sinews, the inner ones draw the limbs together, the outer ones pull them back.

219| Among these lie hidden the arteries, that is, the paths of breath; veins swim along them, that is, streams of blood. The beat of the arteries is most evident at the extremities of the limbs, almost an index of diseases, arranged by Herophilus, prophet of medicine, with wonderful skill into fixed measures and metrical laws according to age, steady or quick or slow; abandoned because of its excessive subtlety, yet by the observation of a frequent or languid stroke it steers the helm of life.

220| The arteries lack feeling, for they lack blood too. Nor do all contain the vital breath, and when severed only that part of the body grows numb. Birds have neither veins nor arteries, and likewise serpents, tortoises, lizards, and have very little blood. The veins, scattered under the whole skin in the end into very thin fringes, are drawn out into such narrow fineness that blood cannot penetrate, but only a moisture driven out from it, which at the innumerable tips is called sweat. At the navel is the knot and meeting of the veins.

221| Those in whom the blood is plentiful and thick are quick to anger. In males it is darker than in females, and in youth than in age, and thicker in the lower part. A great part of vitality is in it. When let out it draws breath with it, yet it does not feel touch. Among animals the stronger are those with thicker blood, the wiser those with thinner, the more timid those with the least or none.

222| The blood of bulls coagulates most quickly and hardens, and for that reason is deadly to drink; next that of boars, but in stags, roe deer and buffaloes it is not thickened at all. It is thickest in asses, thinnest in man. In those with more than four feet there is none. In fat animals it is less abundant, since it is consumed by the fat.

223| A flow of it occurs in men alone among males, in others from one nostril or both, in some through the lower parts, in many through the mouth at a fixed time, as lately with Macrinus Viscus, a man of praetorian rank, and every year with Volusius Saturninus, prefect of the city, who passed even his ninetieth year. This alone in the body feels a temporary increase, if indeed victims pour out more abundantly if they have drunk first.

224| The animals which we said lie hidden at fixed times have no blood then, except very small drops around the heart, by a wonderful work of nature, just as in man its force is changed at the smallest moments, not only by sleep, when it is suffused with less material, but according to each state of mind, in shame, anger, fear, with pallor in several ways, and likewise with redness: for one is the redness of anger and another of modesty.

225| For in fear it is certain that it retreats and is nowhere, and in many pierced through it does not flow, which happens only to man. For those which we said change color receive an alien one by a kind of reflection; man alone changes in himself. All diseases and death consume the blood.

226| There are those who think that the subtlety of mind depends not on thinness of blood but that creatures are more or less dull according to the skin and coverings of their bodies, like oysters and tortoises; that the hides of oxen and the bristles of swine stand in the way of the fineness of the breath that passes in, so that it does not pass through pure and clear; so also in man, when a thicker or more callous skin shuts it out: as if indeed the crocodile were not credited with both hardness of back and cleverness.

227| The hide of the hippopotamus is of such thickness that spear-shafts are turned on the lathe from it, and yet it has a certain medical diligence by its own wit. The hides of elephants also are impenetrable shields, though the subtlety of mind in them is reported as the foremost of all four-footed animals. Therefore the skin itself lacks feeling, most of all on the head. Wherever it is by itself and without flesh, when wounded it does not close, as in the cheek and the eyelid.

228| Creatures that bring forth live young have hair; those that lay eggs have feathers or scales or a shell, like tortoises, or a bare skin, like serpents. The quills of all feathers are hollow. Cut off they do not grow, torn out they are born again. Insects fly with fragile membranes, swallows with moist ones over the sea, with dry ones among houses. The wings of bats also have joints.

229| Hairs coming out of a thick skin are bristly, in females finer; in horses they are abundant in the mane, in the lion on the shoulders, in the dasypus both inside the cheeks and under the feet, both of which Trogus reported also in the hare, inferring from this example that hairy men too are more lustful. The hare is the most shaggy of animals.

230| Man alone comes to puberty, and if it does not occur he is sterile in begetting, whether male or female. Hairs in man are produced partly at once, partly later. These are not born in the castrated, and the congenital ones do not cease, as in women not greatly either; yet some are found weak through baldness of the head, as also the down on the face when the monthly courses have stopped. In some they are not born of their own accord after begetting. In four-footed animals the shedding and growing again of hair is annual.

231| In men they grow chiefly in the hair of the head, soon in the beard. When cut they do not grow from the cut, as plants and the rest do, but come out from the root. They grow also in certain diseases, especially consumption, and in old age, even in dead bodies. In the lustful the congenital ones fall out earlier, the added ones grow faster. In four-footed animals in old age they thicken and the wool thins. The backs of four-footed animals are hairy, the bellies smooth. (Glue is boiled out of the hides of oxen, and that of bulls is the best.)

232| Man alone among males has breasts; the other animals have only marks of breasts. But not even the females have them on the chest, except those who can raise their offspring. None of the egg-layers has any, nor milk, except an animal that gives birth. Of birds only the bat; for I think it fabulous about the screech owls, that they give their breasts to the lips of infants. That the strix was among curses already in antiquity is agreed, but which of the birds it is, I do not think established.

233| In asses the teats are sore after foaling, and so they drive off their young in the sixth month, whereas mares give suck almost the whole year. Those with a solid hoof, not above twin births, all have two teats, and not elsewhere than in the groin. In the same place those that are cloven-hoofed and horned, cows four, sheep and goats two. Those that are fruitful with a numerous litter and have toes on their feet have more, and on the whole belly in a double row, like swine, the well-bred twelve, the common two fewer; similarly dogs. Others have four in the middle of the belly, as panthers, others two, as lionesses. The elephant has only two, under the shoulders, not on the breast but further back, hidden in the armpits. None of those with toes has them in the groin.

234| In each litter the sows offer the first teats to the first born, those nearest the throat, and each one knows its own by the order of its birth, and is fed from it and from no other. If its nursling is taken away, that teat at once becomes barren and shrinks back; if one is left out of the whole crowd, only the teat which had been assigned to the one born hangs and gives.

235| Bears bear four teats, dolphins only two papillae in the lowest belly, not conspicuous, and extended a little sideways. No other animal is licked at the run. Whales also and seals nourish their young with their breasts.

236| In a woman the milk flowing before the seventh month is useless; from that month, when births are viable, it is wholesome. In most it flows from the whole breasts and even from the hollow of the armpits. Camels have milk until they are again with young. It is thought most sweet at one measure with three of water added. The cow has none before calving, and at the first after the birth it is always colostra, which, unless water is mixed in, comes together in a hardness like pumice. Pregnant asses become milky at once. For their foals, where the pasture is rich, to taste the mother's milk within two days of the birth is fatal.

237| This kind of evil is called colostration. Cheese is not made from animals toothed on both sides, since their milk does not curdle. The thinnest is that of camels, next of horses, the thickest of the ass, so that they use it in place of rennet.

238| It is thought to contribute something to the whiteness of women's skin. Poppaea, wife of Domitius Nero, at any rate, dragging along five hundred nursing she-asses everywhere with her, even in the bath tub macerated her whole body in that milk, believing that it also stretched the skin. All milk is thickened by fire, and seethes with moisture. Ox milk is more fertile for cheese than goat's, from the same measure almost twice as much. Those that have more than four teats are useless for cheese, and better those that have two.

239| The rennet of a fawn, a hare, a kid is praised, but that of the dasypus is outstanding, which also cures looseness of the bowels, being the only one of animals toothed on both sides. It is a wonder that barbarous peoples, who live on milk, for so many ages have not known or have scorned the gift of cheese, thickening it otherwise into a pleasant sourness and rich butter. It is the froth of milk, thicker and stickier than what is called whey. It must not be omitted that there is in it the force of oil, and that all barbarians and our own infants are anointed with it.

240| Cheese is praised at Rome, where the goods of all nations are judged at close quarters; among those from the provinces that of Nemausus is the best, from the districts of Lesura and Gabali, but its recommendation is brief and only while fresh. The Alps approve their pastures with two kinds: the Dalmatian sends the Docleatic, the Ceutronian the Vatusican. More numerous are those of the Apennine:

241| This sends the Cebanum from Liguria, made chiefly from the milk of sheep, the Sassinas from Umbria, and from the mixed boundary of Etruria and Liguria the Luniensis, conspicuous for its size, since it is pressed even to a thousand pounds each; nearest to the city is the Vestine, which, from the Caedician plain, is the most praised. Flocks of goats too have their praise, especially fresh, when smoke increases the favor, such as is made in the city itself, to be preferred to all; for the taste of the Gallic ones has the force of a drug. Across the seas the Bithynian is generally in glory.

242| That there is salt in the pastures, even where it is not given, is best understood in this way: all cheese in aging turns to salt, and it is certain that such cheeses return to a fresh taste when steeped in vinegar and thyme. They say that Zoroaster lived in the deserts on cheese for 20 years, so tempered that he did not feel age.

243| Among land animals man alone is two-footed. Man alone has jugula and shoulders; the others have armi; man alone has forearms. In those animals that have hands, they are fleshy only on the inside, outside they consist of sinews and skin.

244| Some have six fingers on their hands. We are told that two daughters of Marcus Coranus, of patrician stock, were for that reason called Sedigitae, as was Volcacius Sedigitus, famous in poetry. A man's fingers have three joints apiece, the thumb two; and it bends in opposition to all the fingers, and by itself extends sideways, thicker than the rest. The smallest is equal to it in measure, and the other two to each other, between which the middle one extends the farthest. Four-footed animals that live by plunder have five toes on the front feet, four on the rest.

245| Lions, wolves, dogs, the panther have five claws on the hind feet also, with one hanging near the joint of the leg; the rest, which are smaller, have also five toes. Arms are not equal to each other in all. It is known that Studiosus, a Thracian in the gladiatorial school of Gaius Caesar, had a longer right arm. Some animals use their forefeet as hands in service and sit bringing food to the mouth with them, as squirrels.

246| For the kinds of apes contain a perfect imitation of man in the face, nostrils, ears, eyelids, which they alone of four-footed animals have on the lower lid also, and then breasts on the chest and arms and legs bent in the opposite direction in the same way, nails on the hands, fingers and a longer middle one. In the feet they differ a little; for they are very long like hands, but make a track like a palm. They have a thumb and joints as man does, and besides the genitals, and these in males only, all the inner organs also after the pattern.

247| Nails are considered the final closings of the sinews. All have them that have fingers. But in apes they are overlapping, in men broad, and they grow even after death; in the rapacious hooked, in the rest straight, as in dogs, except the one that hangs from the leg in most.

248| All that have feet have toes, except the elephant; for his are shapeless, five in number indeed, but undivided and slightly separated and like hooves, not nails, and the front feet are larger, in the hind feet the joints short. He also bends the hams inward like a man, whereas the other animals bend the hind feet in the opposite direction to the front. For those that bring forth live young bend the knees forward and the joints of the pasterns backward.

249| In man the knees and elbows are opposed, likewise in bears and the race of apes, which are therefore the least swift. In egg-laying four-footed animals, the crocodile and the lizards, the front knees bend backward, the hind ones forward. And their legs are oblique, like the human thumb. So also in many-footed creatures, except that the last leap. Birds, like four-footed animals, bend the wings forward, the pastern backward.

250| In man's knees there is also something of religious awe, by the observance of nations. These suppliants touch, to these they stretch their hands, these they adore like altars, perhaps because vitality is in them. For in the very joint of the knee, on right and left, at the front there is a certain twin hollowness of cheeks, by piercing which the breath flows out as from a throat. There is some religious awe in other parts as well, as in the right hand: its back is sought for kisses, and it is held out in pledge of good faith.

251| For the ancients of Greece it was the custom, when supplicating, to touch the chin. There is a seat of memory at the bottom of the ear, which we touch as we call witnesses; behind the right ear, likewise, is the place of Nemesis, a goddess who has found no Latin name even on the Capitol; to it we carry the finger next to the smallest after touching it to the mouth, depositing there with the gods the pardon for what we have said.

252| Varicose veins in the legs belong to men only, rarely to a woman. Oppius is the authority that Gaius Marius, who was consul seven times, was the only man who allowed one to be drawn out while he stood.

253| All animals advance on the right parts and lie on the left. The rest walk as they please; the lion alone and the camel go foot by foot, that is, so that the left foot does not pass the right but follows it. Man has the largest feet, and in every kind the female has thinner ones. Calves and legs are fleshy in man only. It is found in authors that a certain man in Egypt had no calves. The hollow of the sole is man's alone, with some exceptions.

254| For from this too the surnames Plancus, Plautus, Pansa, Scaurus have been found, as from the legs Varus, Vatia, Vatinus, faults which occur in four-footed animals also. Those that are not horned have solid hooves; therefore the blow of the hoof is their weapon in place of horns. The same have no ankle bones, but those that are cloven-hoofed have them. Those with toes have none, nor does any at all in the front feet. The camel's ankle bones are like those of oxen, but a little smaller; for it is cloven by a small division; the foot in its track is fleshy, like a bear's, for which reason on a longer journey without shoes they grow weary.

255| Hooves grow again only in the race of beasts of burden. Swine in certain places in Illyricum have solid hooves. Horned animals are generally cloven-hoofed; none has a solid hoof and two horns; the Indian ass alone has one horn; the oryx has one horn and is cloven-hoofed. The Indian ass alone of solid-hoofed animals has ankle bones, for swine are held to belong to both kinds, and for that reason their ankle bones are foul. Those who believed that man has them were easily refuted. The lynx alone of those with toes has something like an ankle bone; the lion has it even more twisted. The ankle bone is straight in the joint of the foot, projecting with a hollow belly, bound to the vertebra.

256| Of birds some are digitate, some web-footed, some between the two, with the toes divided and a breadth added. But all have four toes, three in front, one behind at the heel. Some long-legged birds lack this one. The iynx alone has two on each side; the same stretches out a tongue like a serpent's to a great length; it turns its neck round toward its back; its claws are large, like jackdaws'.

257| In some of the heavier birds spurs are added on the legs; none of those with hooked claws has them. Long-legged birds fly with the legs stretched out to the tail; those with short ones, drawn up to the middle. Those who deny that any bird is without feet affirm that the apodes have them, and show also the drepanis, which of these appears very rarely. (Serpents have also been seen with goose feet.)

258| The first feet of insects are longer in those having hard eyes, so that they repeatedly wipe them with their feet, as we note in flies. Those among them that have the last feet long leap, as locusts. All of these have six feet. In some spiders two very long ones are added. Each has three joints. We have said that sea creatures also have eight: polypi, cuttlefish, squid, crabs, which move their arms in the opposite direction, their feet in a circle or sideways; these are the only animals that are round.

259| The rest have two feet leading, crabs alone four. Those that are worms have not fewer than twelve, and some a hundred each. No animal has an odd number of feet.

260| The legs of solid-hoofed animals are born at once of full measure, afterwards extending themselves rather than growing. And so in infancy they scratch their ears with the hind feet, which with added age they cannot, because length enlarges only the surface of the bodies. For this reason at the beginning they cannot graze except with the knees bent, nor until the neck reaches its proper growth. A race of dwarfs exists in all animals, and even among birds.

261| The genitals of males, in those in which they are directed backward, we have mentioned. They are bony in wolves, foxes, weasels, ferrets, whence also the chief remedies for human stone. In the bear too, they say, as soon as it has expired, it becomes horn. That of a camel is the most trustworthy for stringing bows among the peoples of the East. There are also differences of nations in this matter and even of rites, the Galli of the Mother of the Gods cutting off without harm.

262| On the contrary, in a few women there is a portentous resemblance, as in hermaphrodites of both sexes, which I think happened first in the reign of Nero even to the race of four-footed animals. At any rate, he displayed mares which were hermaphrodites, harnessed to his carriage, found in the Treveran country of Gaul: as if it were clearly a thing worth seeing, that the prince of the world should sit upon portents.

263| In sheep and cattle the testicles hang down to the legs, in swine they are attached. The dolphin has very long ones, hidden in the lowest belly; in the elephant also hidden. In egg-layers they adhere inside to the loins, such as are quickest in Venus. In fish and serpents there are none, but in their place two veins run from the kidneys to the genitals. Buzzards have three. In man alone they are broken by injury or spontaneously by nature, and this is the third kind, after hermaphrodites and eunuchs, the half-men. (Males in every kind are stronger except in panthers and bears.)

264| Tails belong to nearly all except man and apes, among those that bring forth live young and those that lay eggs, according to the need of the bodies: bare in the hairy, as in boars, small in the shaggy, as in bears, very long in the bristly, as in horses. Cut off, they grow again in lizards and serpents. In fishes they guide the course like a rudder, and moved right and left they drive on as by a kind of oarage. In lizards double ones are found too.

265| The tails of cattle have a very long stem and bristly at the bottom; the same in asses is longer than in horses, but bristly in beasts of burden. The lion's is bristly at the beginning, as are the ox's and the shrew's, not so the panther's; in foxes and wolves it is shaggy, as in sheep, where it is longer. Swine twist theirs; degenerate dogs bend theirs back under the belly.

266| Aristotle thinks that none has a voice except those that have a lung and arteries, that is, those that breathe. For this reason insects too have a sound, not a voice, the breath passing in and sounding when shut up; some give a hum, as bees, others a contracted shrill, as cicadas, for the breath received into two cavities under the chest, with a movable membrane meeting it inside, sounds by its rubbing. Flies, bees and the like begin and cease to be heard with their flight, for the sound is made by friction and the air within, not by breath; locusts sound by the rubbing of wings and thighs.

267| Let it be granted that likewise the scallops among water creatures whirr when they fly; soft creatures and those covered with a shell have neither voice nor any sound. But the other fishes, though they lack lung and artery, are not wholly without any sound, they quibble that this whirr is made by the teeth, and the one called the goat in the river Achelous has a grunt, and others of which we have spoken. In egg-layers the sound is a hiss, in serpents long, in the tortoise abrupt. In frogs it is of its own kind, as has been said, unless even about these the doubt is to be tolerated, because the voice is formed in the mouth, not in the chest. Yet the nature of places matters much in these: they are said to be mute in Macedonia, and mute are the boars.

268| Of birds the smaller are more talkative, and chiefly around mating: some have a voice in the fight, as quails, some before the fight, as partridges, some when they have conquered, as cocks. The males have their own, in others the same belongs also to the females, as in the kind of nightingales. Some sing the whole year, some at fixed times, as has been said under each.

269| The elephant, short of the nostrils, produces with the mouth itself a sound like a sneeze, through the nostrils one like the hoarseness of trumpets. In cattle only the voice of females is deeper, in every other kind it is shriller than in males, in man even in the castrated.

270| No voice of an infant is heard in birth before it has wholly emerged from the womb. The first speech is at a year; but the son of Croesus spoke at six months, even in his rattles, as a portent by which that whole kingdom fell. Those who begin to speak sooner begin to walk later. The voice is strengthened from the age of 14; the same in old age is thinner, and in no other animal is it changed more often. There are also wonders about the voice worth telling: in the orchestras of theaters it is swallowed up if sawdust or sand is thrown over, likewise by rough surrounding walls, even by empty jars. It runs along a straight or curved stretch of walls, carrying words spoken in however light a sound to the other end, if no unevenness impedes.

271| The voice in man has a great part of the countenance. We recognize it before we see, no otherwise than by the eyes, and there are as many voices as there are mortals in the nature of things, and each has his own as he has his face. Hence that diversity of nations and of so many tongues over the whole world, hence so many songs and measures and inflections, but before all else the expression of the mind, which has set us apart from wild beasts and has made another distinction among men themselves, no less than from brutes.

272| Members born with animals are useless, as the sixth finger in man is always. It pleased the Egyptians to rear a portent, a man with two eyes also in the back part of the head, but not seeing with them.

273| I wonder indeed that Aristotle not only believed but also set down that there are in the bodies themselves some foreknowledge of life. Although I regard these as vain and not to be put forward without hesitation, lest each person anxiously look for such omens in himself, I shall touch on them nevertheless, because so great a man did not scorn them in his teachings.

274| He therefore gives as signs of a short life sparse teeth, very long fingers, a leaden color, and several creases in the hand and not continuous. On the other hand, those of long life are the round-shouldered, and those with one or two long creases in the hand, and more than 32 teeth, and large ears. Nor does he observe all these together, as I think, but one by one, trivial, as I suppose, and yet commonly told. Trogus likewise among us, himself an author of the most severe, added also the study of character, which I shall subjoin in his words:

275| A forehead, for those who have it large, signifies that [….] lies beneath; for those who have it small, a fickle man; for those who have it round, an irascible one, as if from this trace a swelling appears. Eyebrows that extend in a straight line signify the soft; those that bend near the nose, the austere; those that bend near the temples, mockers; those that are lowered throughout, the malevolent and envious.

276| Eyes that are long on both sides indicate those who are of mischievous character; those who have fleshy corners next to the nostrils give a mark of malice: the white part extended has a mark of shamelessness; those who are accustomed repeatedly to close them, of inconstancy. The size of the ears is a mark of talkativeness and folly. So far Trogus.

277| The breath of the lion has a heavy poison, of the bear a pestilential one. No wild beast touches anything touched by its breath, and things breathed on rot more quickly. Of the rest, nature willed that man alone be tainted in several ways, by faults of food and of teeth, but most of all by old age. It could not feel pain, it lacked all touch and sense, without which nothing is felt; the same went in and out freshly and continually, about to depart at the last and be the only part of man to survive; finally this was drawn from the sky:

278| Yet a punishment has been found for this too, so that not even the very thing by which we live should give us pleasure in life. This affliction falls chiefly on the peoples of Parthia, and from their youth, because of their indiscriminate diet; for their mouths also reek from too much wine. But their nobles treat themselves with a seed of the Assyrian apple, whose sweetness is also outstanding, added to their food.

279| The breath of elephants draws snakes out of their holes; the breath of deer burns them. We have spoken of the races of men who drew the venom of snakes out of bodies by sucking. Indeed, snakes are even part of the fodder of pigs, while to other animals they are poison. The creatures we have called insects are all killed by a sprinkling of oil; vultures by perfume — they seek out the smell that drives others away; beetles by the rose. Some snakes are killed by the scorpion. The Scythians dip their arrows in vipers' venom and human blood; it is a crime beyond remedy: it brings death on the spot at the slightest touch.

280| We have said which animals feed on poison. Some, harmless in other respects, become harmful themselves when they have fed on poisonous things. In Pamphylia and the mountainous parts of Cilicia, those who have eaten wild boars that have devoured a salamander die, for there is no way of detecting it by smell or taste. Water and wine too are made deadly by a salamander that has died in them, or even if it has merely drunk from the place the drink is taken from; and the same is true of the frog they call the rubeta. So many are the snares laid for life!

281| Wasps feed greedily on snakes, and from this food they make their stings deadly. And so great is the difference in diet that Theophrastus reports that in a region where people live on fish the cattle too eat fish — but only when it is alive.

282| For man the most useful food is simple; heaping flavours together is pestilent, and seasoning makes it more pernicious still. All foods that are sharp, harsh, unfamiliar, varied, excessive or greedily gulped are hard to digest, and harder in summer than in winter, and more so in old age than in youth. The vomitings that men have devised as a remedy for these make the body colder, and are especially harmful to the eyes and teeth.

283| Digesting in sleep is more useful for bulk than for strength; that is why it is preferred that athletes complete their digestion by walking. Indeed, it is above all by staying awake that food is mastered. Bodies grow on sweet and fatty things and on drink; they waste on dry, parched and cold things and on thirst. Certain animals, and the flocks too in Africa, drink on the fourth day. For a man, going without food is not necessarily fatal on the seventh day; it is certain that many have lasted even beyond the eleventh. The disease of hunger, with an appetite that can never be filled, belongs to man alone among the animals.

284| Some things, on the other hand, allay hunger and thirst with a small taste and preserve the strength, such as butter, hippace and glycyrrhiza. But in every part of life the most pernicious thing is excess, and above all for the body; and it is better to reduce whatever burdens it, by any means at all. But let us pass on to the rest of nature.

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