BOOK VIII. xLi. 99-IOI 



out all glossy for spring ; but it begins the process at 

 its head, and takes at least 24 hours to do it, folding 

 the skin backward so that what was the inner side 

 of it becomes the outside. Moreover as its sight is 

 obscured by its hibernation it anoints and revives its 

 eyes by rubbing itself against a fennel plant, but if 

 its scales have become numbed it scratches itself on 

 the spiny leaves of a juniper. A large snake quenches 

 its spring nausea with the juice of wild lettuce. 

 Barbarian hunters catch leopards by means of meat 

 rubbed over with wolf 's-bane ; their throats are at 

 once attacked by violent pain (in consequence of 

 which some people have given this poison a Greek 

 name meaning choke-leopard), but to cure this the 

 creature doses itself with human excrement, and in 

 general it is so greedy for this that shepherds have 

 a plan of hanging up some of it in a vessel too high 

 for the leopard to be able to reach it by jumping up, 

 and the animal keeps springing up and trying to get 

 it till it is exhausted and finally dies, although other- 

 wise its vitality is so persistent that it will go on 

 fighting for a long time after its entrails have been 

 torn out. When an elephant swallows a chameleon 

 (which is poisonous to it) because it is of the same 

 colour as a leaf, it uses the wild olive as a remedy. 

 When bears have swallowed the fruit of the mandrake 

 they Hck up ants. A stag uses wild artichoke as an 

 antidote to poisoned fodder. Pigeons, jays, black- 

 birds and partridges cure their yearly distaste 

 for food with bay-leaves ; doves, turtle-doves and 

 domestic fowls use the plant called helxine°-, ducks, 

 geese and other watei--fowl water-starwort, cranes 

 and the hke marsh-rushes. When a raven has 

 killed a chameleon Hzard, which is noxious even to 



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