cult? seeing the herb ethiopis opens all locks
whatsoever, and an echinus or remora, a silly weakly fish, in spite of all
the winds that blow from the thirty-two points of the compass, will in the
midst of a hurricane make you the biggest first-rate remain stock still, as
if she were becalmed or the blustering tribe had blown their last. Nay,
and with the flesh of that fish, preserved with salt, you may fish gold out
of the deepest well that was ever sounded with a plummet; for it will
certainly draw up the precious metal, since Democritus affirmed it.
Theophrastus believed and experienced that there was an herb at whose
single touch an iron wedge, though never so far driven into a huge log of
the hardest wood that is, would presently come out; and it is this same
herb your hickways, alias woodpeckers, use, when with some mighty axe
anyone stops up the hole of their nests, which they industriously dig and
make in the trunk of some sturdy tree. Since stags and hinds, when deeply
wounded with darts, arrows, and bolts, if they do but meet the herb called
dittany, which is common in Candia, and eat a little of it, presently the
shafts come out and all is well again; even as kind Venus cured her beloved
byblow Aeneas when he was wounded on the right thigh with an arrow by
Juturna, Turnus's sister. Since the very wind of laurels, fig-trees, or
sea-calves makes the thunder sheer off insomuch that it never strikes them.
Since at the sight of a ram, mad elephants recover their former senses.
Since mad bulls coming near wild fig-trees, called caprifici, grow tame,
and will not budge a foot, as if they had the cramp. Since the venomous
rage of vipers is assuaged if you but touch them with a beechen bough.
Since also Euphorion writes that in the isle of Samos, before Juno's temple
was built there, he has seen some beasts called neades, whose voice made
the neighbouring places gape and sink into a chasm and abyss. In short,
since elders grow of a more pleasing sound, and fitter to make flutes, in
such places where the crowing of cocks is not heard, as the ancient sages
have writ and Theophrastus relates; as if the crowing of a cock dulled,
flattened, and perverted the wood of the elder, as it is said to astonish
and stupify with fear that strong and resolute animal, a lion. I know that
some have understood this of wild elder, that grows so far from towns or
villages that the crowing of cocks cannot reach near it; and doubtless tha