Ohap. 9.] REMEDIES DEBITED FEOM WOOL. 381 



they have persuaded us, for the proper digestion of the food, 

 baths which no one ever leaves without being all the weaker 

 for it, and from which the more submissive of their patients 

 are only carried to the tomb; potions taken fasting ; vomits to 

 clear the stomach, and then a series of fresh drenchings with 

 drink ; emasculation, self-inflicted by the use of pitch-plasters 

 as depilatories ; the public exposure, too, of even the most de- 

 licate parts of the female body for the prosecution of these 

 practices. Most assuredly so it is, the contagion which has 

 seized upon the public morals, has had no more fertile source 

 than the medical art, and it continues, day by day even, to 

 justify the claims of Cato to be considered a prophet and an 

 oracle of wisdom, in that assertion of his, that it is quite suffi- 

 cient to dip into the records of Greek genius, without becoming 

 thoroughly acquainted with them. 



Such then is what may be said in justification of the senate 

 and of the Iloinan people, during that period of. six hundred 

 years in which they manifested such repugnance to an art, by 

 the most insidious terms of which, good men are made to lend 

 their credit and authority to the very worst, and so strongly 

 entered their protest against the silly persuasions entertained by 

 those, who fancy that nothing can benefit them but what is 

 coupled with high price. 



I entertain no doubt, too, that there will be found some to ex- 

 press their disgust at the particulars which I am about to give, in 

 relation to animals : and yet Yirgil himself has not disdained 

 when, too, there was no necessity for his doing so to speak 

 of ants and weevils, 



" And nests by beetles made that shun the light." 63 



Homer,* 4 too, amid his description of the battles of the gods, 

 has not disdained to remark upon the voracity of the common 

 fly; nor has Nature, she who engendered man, thought it beneath 

 her to engender these insects as well. Let each then make it 

 his care, not so much to regard the thing itself, as to rightly 

 appreciate in each case the cause and its effects. 



CHAP. 9. THIRTY- FIVE REMEDIES DERIVED FROM WOOL. 



I shall begin then with some remedies that are well known, 



l " Lucifugis congesta cubilia blattis." Georg. I. 184, IV. 243. 

 w 11. xvii. 570, et seq. 



