We may now turn to the still more numerous passages of the Natural History where the magi are not cited and compare the virtues there ascribed to the things of nature and the methods employed in medicine and agriculture with those of the magicians. We shall find many striking resemblances and shall soon come to a realization that there is more magic in the Natural History which is not attributed to the magi than there is that is. Pliny did not need to warn us that medicine had been corrupted by magic; his own medicine proves it. It is this fact, that virtually his entire work is crammed with marvelous properties and fantastic ceremonial, which makes it so difficult in some places to tell when he begins to draw material from the magi and when he leaves off. By a detailed analysis of this remaining material we shall now attempt to classify the substances of which Pliny makes use and the virtues which he ascribes to them, the rites and methods of procedure by which they are employed, and certain superstitious doctrines and notions which are involved. We shall thus find that almost precisely the same factors are present in his science as in the lore of the magicians.
Habits of animals.
Of substances we may begin with animals,[261] and, before we note the human use of their virtues with its strong suggestion of magic, may remark another unscientific and superstitious feature which was very common both in ancient and medieval times. This is the tendency to humanize animals, ascribing to them conscious motives, habits, and ruses, or even moral standards and religious veneration. We shall have occasion to note the same thing in other authors and so will give but a few specimens from the many in the Natural History. Such qualities are attributed by Pliny especially to elephants, whom he ranks next to man in intelligence, and whom he represents as worshiping the stars, learning difficult tricks, and as having a sense of justice, feeling of mercy, and so on.[262] Similarly the lion has noble courage and a sense of gratitude, while the lioness is wily in the devices by which she conceals her amours with the pard.[263] A number of the devices of fishes to escape hooks and nets are repeated by Pliny from Ovid’s Halieuticon, extant only in fragments.[264] The crocodile opens its jaws to have its teeth picked by a friendly bird; but sometimes while this operation is being performed the ichneumon “darts down its throat like a javelin and eats away its intestines.”[265] Pliny also marvels at the cleverness displayed by the dragon and the elephant in their combats with one another,[266] which, however, almost invariably terminate fatally to both combatants, the elephant falling exhausted in the dragon’s coils and crushing the serpent by its weight. Others say that in the hot summer the dragons thirst for the blood of the elephant which is very cold; in their combat the elephant falls drained of its blood and crushes the dragon who is intoxicated by the same.
Remedies discovered by animals.
The dragon’s apparent knowledge that the elephant is cold-blooded leads us to a kindred topic, the remedies used by animals and often discovered by men only by seeing animals use them. This notion continued in the middle ages, as we shall see, and of course it did not originate with Pliny. As he says himself, “The ancients have recorded the remedies of wild beasts and shown how they are healed even when poisoned.”[267] Against aconite the scorpion eats white hellebore as an antidote, while the panther employs human excrement.[268] Animals prepare themselves for combats with poisonous snakes by eating certain herbs; the weasel eats rue, the tortoise and deer use two other plants, while field mice who have been stung by snakes eat condrion.[269] The hawk tears open the hawkweed and sprinkles its eyes with the juice.[270] The serpent tastes fennel when it sheds its old skin.[271] Sick bears cure themselves by a diet of ants.[272] Swallows restore the sight of their young with chelidonia or swallow-wort,[273] and the historian Xanthus says that the dragon restores its dead offspring to life with an herb called balis.[274] The hippopotamus was the original discoverer of bleeding,[275] opening a vein in his leg by wounding himself on sharp reeds along the shore, and afterwards checking the flow of blood by plastering the place with mud.[276] Pliny, however, states in one passage that animals hit upon all these remedies by chance and even have to rediscover them by accident in each new case, “since,” he continues in conformity with recent animal psychologists, “reason and practice cannot be transmitted between wild beasts.”[277]
Jealousy of animals.
Yet in another passage Pliny deplores the spitefulness of the dog which, while men are looking, will not pluck the herb by which it cures itself of snake-bite.[278] Probably Pliny is using different authorities in the two passages. Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle, had written a work on Jealous Animals. More excusable than the spitefulness of the dog is the attitude of the dragon, from whose brain the gem draconitis must be taken while the dragon is alive and preferably asleep. For if the dragon feels that it is mortally wounded, it takes revenge by spoiling the gem.[279] Elephants know that men hunt them only for their tusks, and so bury these when they fall off.[280]
Occult virtues of animals.
Animals have marvelous virtues of their own other than the medicinal uses to which men have put them. For instance, the mere glance of the basilisk is fatal, and its breath burns up vegetation and breaks rocks.[281] But the medicinal effects which Pliny ascribes to animals and parts of animals are well nigh infinite. Many animal substances will have to be introduced in other connections so that we need mention now but a very few: the heads and blood of flies, honey in which bees have died, cinere genitalis asini, chicks in the egg, and thrice seven centipedes diluted with Attic honey,[282]—this last a prescription for asthma and to be taken through a reed because it blackens every dish by its contact. Another passage advises eating a rat or shrew-mouse in order to bear a baby with black eyes.[283] These items are enough to convince us that the animals and parts of animals employed by the magicians were not one whit more bizarre and nauseating than the others found in the Natural History, nor were the cures which they were expected to work any more improbable. In order to illustrate, however, the delicate distinctions which were imagined to exist not only between the virtues of different parts of the same animal, but also between slightly varied uses of the same part, we may note that scales scraped from the topmost part of a tortoise’s shell and administered in drink check sexual desire, considering which, it is, as Pliny remarks, the more marvelous that a powder made of the entire shell is reported to arouse lust.[284] But love turns readily to hatred in magic as well as in romance, and it is nothing very unusual, as we shall find in other authors, for the same thing on slight provocation to work in exactly opposite ways.
The virtues of herbs.