BOOK VII. XVI. 70-73 



ment, as the front teeth regulate the voice and speech, 

 meeting the impact of the tongue with a kind of 

 harmony, and according to their regularity of arrange- 

 ment and size clipping or modulating or else duUing 

 the words, and when they are lost preventing all 

 clear articulation. Moreover this part of the body 

 is beheved to possess prophetic powers. Males 

 (excepting the Turduli tribe) have 32 teeth ; there 

 have been cases of men with more — tliis is thought to 

 foretell a longer term of hfe. Women have fewer ; 

 with them two dogteeth on the right side of the 

 upper jaw are a promise of fortune's favours, as in 

 the case of Domitius Nero's mother Agrippina; on 

 the left side the opposite. — (It is the universal 

 custom of mankind not to cremate a person who dies 

 before cutting his teeth.") — But more of this later 

 when our researches go through the parts of the 

 body seriatim. 



It is recorded of only one person, Zoroaster, that he Eicevtionai 

 laughed on the same day on which he was born, ^'■'''^''«"y- 

 and also that his brain throbbed so violently as to 

 dislodge a hand placed on liis head — this foretelling 

 his future knowledge. 



It is known that at the age of three a person'8 numan 

 measurement is half his future stature. But it is *'?"!''*. . 

 alniost a matter of observation that with the entire 

 human race the stature on the wliole is becoming 

 smaller daily, and that few men are taller than their 

 fathers, as the conflagration that is the crisis towards 

 which the age is now verging is exhausting the 

 fertiUty of the semen. When a mountain in Crete 

 was cleft by an earthquake a body 69 feet in height Gxanu and 

 was found, which some people thought must be that 

 of Orion and others of Otus.* The records attest 



553 



