d the
negative 310,952. And Xenocrates says, the number of syllables which the
letters will make is 100,200,000. How then is it strange that the body,
having so many different powers in itself, and getting new qualities
every day from its meat and drink, and using those motions and
alterations which are not always in the same time nor in the same order,
should upon the various complications of all these be affected with new
diseases? Such was the plague at Athens described by Thucydides, who
conjectures that it was new because that birds and beasts of prey would
not touch the dead carcasses. Those that fell sick about the Red Sea, if
we believe Agatharcides, besides other strange and unheard diseases, had
little serpents in their legs and arms, which did eat their way out, but
when touched shrunk in again, and raised intolerable inflammations in
the muscles; and yet this kind of plague, as likewise many others, never
afflicted any beside, either before or since. One, after a long stoppage
of urine, voided a knotty barley straw. And we know that Ephebus, with
whom we lodged at Athens, threw out, together with a great deal of seed,
a little hairy, many-footed, nimble animal. And Aristotle tells us,
that Timon's nurse in Cilicia every year for two months lay in a cave,
without any vital operation besides breathing. And in the Menonian books
it is delivered as a symptom of a diseased liver carefully to observe
and hunt after mice and rats, which we see now nowhere practised.

Therefore let us not wonder if something happens which never was before,
or if something doth not appear among us with which the ancients were
acquainted; for the cause of those accidents is the nature of our body,
whose temperature is subject to be changed. Therefore, if Diogenianus
will not introduce a new kind of water or air, we, having no need of it,
are very well content. Yet we know some of Democritus's scholars affirm
that, other worlds being dissolved, some strange effluvia fall into
ours, and are the principle of new plagues and uncommon diseases. But
let us not now take notice of the corruption of some parts of this
world by earthquake, droughts, and floods, by which both the vapors and
fountains rising out of the earth must be necessarily corrupted. Yet we
must not pass by that change which must be wrought in the body by our
meat, drink, and other exercises in our course of life. For many things
which the ancients did not feed on are now acc