In dogs there exists a certain dialectical faculty of ratiocination.[1461] The weather may be predicted from birds, quadrupeds, and flies.[1462] The she-goat can cure suffusion of its eyes.[1463] Eagles drop tortoises on rocks to break their shells and the bald-headed poet Aeschylus met his death by having his pate mistaken thus for a smooth round stone.[1464] Some predict the future by birds, others by entrails, or by grains, sieves, and cheeses; the Lycians practice divination by fish.[1465] A stork whom a widow of Tarentum helped when it was too young to fly brought her a luminous precious stone the following year.[1466] Solon did not have to enact a law ordering children to support their aged parents in the case of lions, whose cubs are taught by nature filial piety toward their elders.[1467] Only the horn of the Scythian ass can hold the water of the Arcadian river Styx; Alexander the Great sent a sample of it to Delphi with some accompanying verses which Aelian quotes.[1468] In Epirus dragons sacred to Apollo are employed in divination, and in the Lavinian Grove dragons spit out again the frumenty offered them by unchaste virgins.[1469] By flying beneath it an eagle saved the life of its young one who had been thrown down from a tower.[1470] Different fish eat different sea herbs.[1471] There are fish who live in boiling water.[1472] There are scattered mentions of the marvels of India throughout Aelian’s work, and in his sixteenth book the first fourteen chapters are almost exclusively concerned with the animals of that land. [Sidenote: Solinus in the middle ages.] A well-known work in the middle ages dating from the period of the Roman Empire was the _Collectanea rerum memorabilium_ or _Polyhistor_ of Solinus. Mommsen’s edition lists 153 manuscripts from 32 places,[1473] and we shall find many citations of Solinus in our later medieval authors. Martianus Capella and Isidore were the first to make extensive use of his work. In the thirteenth century Albertus Magnus had little respect for Solinus as an authority and expressed more than once the quite accurate opinion that his work was full of lies. Nevertheless copies of it continued to abound in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and by 1554 five printed editions had appeared. “From it directly come most of the fables in works of object so different as those of Dicuil, Isidore, Capella, and Priscian.”[1474] [Sidenote: His date.]