Chap. 25.] 
EEMEDIES DEBITED JFEOM POITLTEY. 
399 
this bird about them will be safe, not only from serpents, but 
from wild beasts as well, and will have nothing to fear from, 
the attacks of robbers or from the wrath of kings. 
CHAP. 25. EEMEDIES DERIVED EROM POULTRY. 
The flesh of cocks and capons, applied warm the moment it 
has been plucked from the bones, neutralizes the venom of 
serpents ; and the brains, taken in wine, are productive of a 
similar effect. The people of Parthia, however, prefer apply- 
ing a hen's brains to the wound. Poultry broth, too, is highly 
celebrated as a cure, and is found marvellously useful in many 
other cases. Panthers and lions will never touch persons who 
have been rubbed with it, more particularly if it has been 
flavoured with garlic. The broth that is made of an old cock 
is more relaxing to the bowels ; it is very good also for chronic 
fevers, numbness of the limbs, cold shiverings and maladies of 
the joints, pains also in the head, defluxions of the eyes, 
flatulency, sickness at stomach, incipient tenesmus, liver 
complaints, diseases of the kidneys, affections of the bladder, 
indigestion, and asthma. Hence there are several recipes for 
preparing this broth ; it being most efficacious when boiled up 
with sea- cabbage,^* salted tunny, capers, parsley, the plant 
mercurialis,^^ polypodium,^"^ or dill. The best plan, however, 
is to boil the cock or capon with the plants above-mentioned in 
three congii of water, down to three semi-sextarii ; after which 
it should be left to cool in the open air, and given at the proper 
moment, just after an emetic has been administered. 
And here I must not omit to mention one marvellous fact, 
even though it bears no reference to medicine : if the flesh of 
poultry is mingled with gold^^ in a state of fusion, it will 
absorb the metal and consume it, thus showing that it acts 
as a poison upon gold. If young twigs are made up into a 
collar and put round a cock's neck, it will never crow. 
3* See B. xxii. c. 33. 
2^ "Cybium." See B. ix. c. 18. Dioscorides says the plant cneeos, de- 
scribed by Pliny in B. sxi. c. 107. 
36 See B. xxv. c. 18, and B. xxvii. c. 77. 
3"^ See B. xvi, c. 92, and B. xxvi. cc. 37, 66. 
3^ Hereupon peradventure it is that in colli ces and cockbroths we use 
to seeth pieces of gold, with an opinion to make them thereby more re- 
storative." — Holland. 
