Chap. 9.] REMEDIES DEBITED FEOM WOOL. 881 
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 Eoman 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 hght."^^ 
Homer, too, amid his description of the battles of the gods, 
has not disdained to remark upon the voracity of the common 
fly; nor has I^ature, 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 eflects. 
CHAP. 9. THIKTY-rrVE EEMEDIES DEKIVED FROM WOOL. 
I shall begin then with some remedies that are well known, 
Lucifiigis congesta cubilia blattis." Georg. I. 184, lY. 243. 
IL xvii. 570, et seq. 
