Obrutus exemptis cancer tellure lacertis,
Scorpius exiguo tempore factus erit.
In English thus:
If that the arms you take from Sea-crab-fish,
And put the rest in earth till all consumed be,
Out of the buried part a Scorpion will arise,
With hooked tayl doth threaten for to hurt thee.
“And therefore it is reported by Ælianus that about Estamenus, in India, there are abundance of Scorpions generated only by corrupt rain-water standing in that place. Also out of the Basalisk beaten into pieces and so putrefied are Scorpions engendered. And when as one had planted the herb basilica on a wall, in the room or place thereof he found two Scorpions. And some say that if a man chaw in his mouth fasting this herb basill before he wash, and afterward lay the same abroad uncovered where no sun cometh at it for the space of seven nights, taking it in all the daytime, he shall at length finde it transmuted into a Scorpion, with a tayl of seven knots.[1086]
“Hollerius,[1087] to take away all scruple of this thing, writeth that in Italy in his dayes there was a man that had a Scorpion bred in his brain by continuall smelling to this herb basill; and Gesner, by relation of an apothecary in France, writeth likewise a story of a young maid who, by smelling to basill, fell into an exceeding headache, whereof she died without cure, and after death, being opened, there were found little Scorpions in her brain.
“Aristotle remembreth an herb which he calleth sissimbria, out of which putrefied Scorpions are engendered, as he writeth. And we have shewed already, in the history of the Crocodile, that out of the Crocodile’s egges do many times come Scorpions, which at their first egression do kill their dam that hatched them, which caused Archelaus, which wrote epigrams of wonders unto Ptolemæus, to sing of Scorpions in this manner: