12 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



OF PLANTS POSSESSING PROPERTIES WHICH AFFECT 



THE MENTAL POWERS 



As to those that affect the mind, strykhnos is said to upset the mental 

 powers and make one mad; while the root of onotheras (oleander) ad- 

 ministered in wine makes the temper gentler and more cheerful. This 

 plant has a leaf like the almond, but smaller, and the flower is red like a 

 rose. The plant itself forms a large bush; the root is red and large and, if 

 this is dried, it gives off a fragrance like wine. 



EXCERPTS FROM Natural History * 



PLINY 



The birth of triplets is attested by the case of Horatii and Curiatii: 

 above that number is considered portentous, except in Egypt, where drink- 

 ing the water of the Nile causes fecundity. Recently on the day of the 

 obsequies of his late Majesty Augustus a certain woman of the lower 

 orders named Fausta at Ostia was delivered of two male and two female 

 infants, which unquestionably portended the food shortage that followed. 

 We also find the case of a woman in the Peloponnese who four times pro- 

 duced quintuplets, the greater number of each birth surviving. In Egypt 

 also Trogus alleges cases of seven infants born at a single birth. 



Persons are also born of both sexes combined — what we call Hermaph- 

 rodites, formerly called androgyni and considered as portents, but now 

 as entertainments. We read of Eutychis who at Realles was carried to her 

 funeral pyre by twenty children and who had given birth thirty times, 

 and Alcippe who gave birth to an elephant. 



Transformation of females into males is not an idle story. A girl at 

 Casinum was changed into a boy, under the observation of the parents and 

 at the order of the augurs was conveyed away to a desert island. I myself 

 saw in Africa a person who had turned into a male on the day of marriage 

 to a husband. (It is said that) at the birth of twins neither the mother nor 

 more than one of the two children usually lives, but that if twins are born 

 that are of different sex it is even more unusual for either to be saved: that 

 females are born more quickly than males, just as they grow older more 

 quickly: and that movement in the womb is more frequent in the case of 

 males, and males are usually carried on the right side, females on the 

 left. 



All the other animals have a fixed season for copulation and for bear- 



* Reprinted by permission of the publishers from the Loeb Classical Library, Pliny: 

 Natural History, Volume II, translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, Mass.: Har- 

 vard University Press, 1942. 



