Chap. 38.] REMEDIES EOE DISEASES OE THE EYES. 
415 
for diseases of the eyes. Some persons enclose a green lizard 
in a new earthen vessel, together with nine of the small stones 
known as cinsedia,"^ which are usually attached to the body 
for tumours in the groin. Upon each of these stones they 
make nine^ marks, and remove one from the vessel daily, 
taking care, when the ninth day is come, to let the lizard go, 
the stones being kept as a remedy for affections of the eyes. 
Others, again, blind a green lizard, and after putting some 
earth beneath it, enclose it in a glass vessel, with some small 
rings of solid iron or gold. When they find, by looking 
through the glass, that the lizard has recovered its sight,® they 
set it at liberty, and keep the rings as a preservative against 
ophthalmia. Others employ the ashes of a lizard's head as 
a substitute for antimony, for the treatment of eruptions of the 
eyes. Some recommend the ashes of the green lizard with a long 
neck that is usually found in sandy soils, as an application for 
incipient defluxions of the eyes, and for glaucoma. They say, 
too, that if the eyes of a weasel are extracted with a pointed 
instrument, its sight will return; the same use being made of it 
as of the lizards and rings above mentioned. The right eye 
of a serpent, worn as an amulet, is very good, it is said, for 
defluxions of the eyes, due care being taken to set the serpent 
at liberty after extracting the eye. For continuous watering^^ 
of the eyes, the ashes of a spotted lizard's head, applied with 
antimony, are remarkably efficacious. 
The cobweb of the common fly-spider, that which lines its 
hole more particularly, applied to the forehead across the 
temples, in a compress of some kind or other, is said to be 
marvellously useful for the cure of defluxions of the eyes : the 
web must be taken, however, and applied by the hands of a 
boy who has not arrived at the years of puberty ; the boy, 
too, must not show himself to the patient for three days, and 
during those three days neither of them must touch the 
ground with his feet uncovered. The white spider^^ with 
See B. xxxvii. c. 56. 
s The mention of this number denotes the Eastern origin of this re- 
medy, Ajasson remarks. 
, ^ See Note 6 above. "Lacrymantibus sine fine oculis.*' 
''" Ajasson remarks, that Pliny has given here a much more exact de- 
scription of the varieties of the Spider, than in the Eleventh Book. The 
learned Commentator gives an elaborate discussion, of eigbteen pages, on 
the varieties of the Spider as known to the ancients in common with modern 
naturalists. 
