Q. Why do physicians forbid the eating of fish and milk at the same time? A. Because they produce a leprosy, and because they are phlegmatic.
Q. Why have not birds and fish milk and paps? A. Because paps would hinder the flight of birds. And although fish have neither paps nor milk, the females cast much spawn, which the male touches with a small gut, and causes their kind to continue in succession.
Of the Back.
Q. Why have beasts a back? A. 1. Because the back is the way and mien of the body from which are extended and spread throughout, all the sinews of the backbone. 2. Because
it should be a guard and defence for the soft parts of the body, as for the stomach, liver, lights and such like. 3. Because it is the foundation of all the bones, as the ribs, fastened to the back bone.
Q. Why hath the back bone so many joints or knots, called spondyli? A. Because the moving and bending it, without such joints, could not be done; and therefore they are wrong who say that elephants have no such joints, for without them they could not move.
Q. Why do fish die after their back bones are broken? A. Because in fish the back bone is instead of the heart; now the heart is the first thing that lives and the last that dies; and when that bone is broken, fish can live no longer.
Q. Why doth a man die soon after the marrow is hurt or perished? A. Because the marrow proceeds from the brain, which is the principal part of a man.
Q. Why have some men the piles? A. Those men are cold and melancholy, which melancholy first passes to the spleen, its proper seat, but there cannot be retained, for the abundancy of blood; for which reason it is conveyed to the back bone, where there are certain veins which terminate in the back, and receive the blood. When those veins are full of the