Throughout the _Apology_ Apuleius occasionally airs his scientific attainments by specific statements and illustrations from the zoological and other scientific fields. Indeed the presence of such allusions is as noticeable in the _Apology_ as was their absence from the _Metamorphoses_. But they go to show that his knowledge was greater than his discretion, since for the most part they repeat familiar errors of contemporary science. We are told—the story is also in Aristotle, Pliny, and Aelian—how the crocodile opens its jaws to have its teeth picked by a friendly bird,[1091] that the viper gnaws its way out of its mother’s womb,[1092] that fish are spontaneously generated from slime,[1093] and that burning the stone _gagates_ will cause an epileptic to have a fit.[1094] On the other hand, the skin shed by a spotted lizard is a remedy for epilepsy, but you must snatch it up speedily or the lizard will turn and devour it, either from natural appetite or just because he knows that you want it.[1095] This tale, so characteristic of the virtues attributed to parts of animals and the human motives ascribed to the animals themselves, is taken by Apuleius from a treatise by Theophrastus entitled _Jealous Animals_. [Sidenote: Apparent ignorance of magic and occult virtue.] In defending what he terms his scientific investigations from the aspersion of magic Apuleius is at times either a trifle disingenuous and inclined to trade upon the ignorance of his judge and accusers, or else not as well informed himself as he might be in matters of natural science and of occult science. He contends that fish are not employed in magic arts, asks mockingly if fish alone possess some property hidden from other men and known to magicians, and affirms that if the accuser knows of any such he must be a magician rather than Apuleius.[1096] He insists that he did not make use of a sea-hare and describes the “fish” in question in detail,[1097] but this description, as is pointed out in Butler and Owen’s edition of the _Apology_,[1098] tends to convince us that it really was a sea-hare. In the case of the two fish with obscene names, he ridicules the arguing from similarity of names to similarity of powers in the things so designated, as if that were not what magicians and astrologers and believers in sympathy and antipathy were always doing. You might as well say, he declares, that a pebble is good for the stone and a crab for an ulcer,[1099] as if precisely these remedies for those diseases were not found in the Pseudo-Dioscorides and in Pliny’s _Natural History_.[1100] [Sidenote: Despite an assumption of knowledge.]