[1352] “Lagonoponon.” Nearly all these asserted virtues of the radish, Fée says, are illusory.
[1353] “Phlegmoni.” Stagnation of the blood, with heat, redness, swelling, and pain.
[1354] “Veternosi.” Fée says that, rigorously speaking, “veternus” was that state of somnolency which is the prelude to apoplexy.
[1355] The Coluber cerastes of Linnæus. See B. viii. c. 35.
[1356] Poinsinet warns us not to place too implicit faith in this assertion.
[1357] Dioscorides says the same, but the assertion is quite destitute of truth.
[1358] Nicander, in his “Alexipharmaca,” ll. 430 and 527, says that the cabbage, not the radish, is good for poisoning by fungi and henbane; and in l. 300 he states that the cabbage is similarly beneficial against the effects of bullock’s blood. Pliny has probably fallen into the error by confounding ῥάφανος, the “cabbage,” with ῥαφανίς, the “radish.”
[1359] Themistocles is said to have killed himself by taking hot bullock’s blood. It is, however, very doubtful.
[1360] “Morbus comitialis”—literally the “comitial disease.” Epilepsy it is said, was so called because, if any person was seized with it at the “Comitia” or public assemblies of the Roman people, it was the custom to adjourn the meeting to another day.
[1361] From μέλας, “black,” and χολή, “bile.” Melancholy, or bad spirits, was so called from a notion that it was owing to a predominance of an imaginary secretion called by the ancients “black bile.”