Let us now further examine Pliny’s picture of magic, not as he expressly defines or censures it, but as he reflects its own assertions and purposes in his fairly numerous citations from its literature and perhaps its practice. Here I shall rather strictly limit my survey to those statements which Pliny definitely ascribes by name to the _magi_ or magic art. The most striking fact is that the magicians are cited again and again concerning the supposed properties, virtues, and effects of things in nature—herbs, animals, and stones. These virtues are, it is true, often employed in an effort to produce wonderful results, and often too they are combined with some fantastic rite or superstitious ceremonial performed by a human agent. But in many cases either no rite at all is suggested or merely some simple medicinal application; and in a few cases there is no mention of any particular operation or result, the magicians are cited simply as authorities concerning the great but unspecified virtues of natural objects. Indeed, they stand out in Pliny’s pages not as mere sorcerers or enchanters or wonder-workers, but as those who have gone the farthest and in most detail—too far and too curiously in Pliny’s opinion—into the study of medicine and of nature. Sometimes their statements, cited without censure, supplement others concerning the species under discussion;[210] sometimes they are his sole source of information on the subject in hand.[211] [Sidenote: The _magi_ on herbs.] Pliny connects the origin of botany rather closely with magic, mentioning Medea and Circe as early investigators of plants and Orpheus among the first writers on the subject.[212] Moreover, Pythagoras and Democritus borrowed from the _magi_ of the orient in their works on the properties of plants.[213] There would be little profit in repeating the names of the herbs concerning which Pliny gives opinions of the magicians, inasmuch as few of them can be associated with any plants known to-day.[214] Suffice it to say that Pliny makes no objection to the herbs which they employed. Nor does he criticize their methods of employing them, although some seem superstitious enough to the modern reader. A chaplet is worn of one herb,[215] others are plucked with the left hand and with a statement of what they are to be used for, and in one case without looking backward.[216] The anemone is to be plucked when it first appears that year with a statement of its intended use, and then is to be wrapped in a red cloth and kept in the shade, and, whenever anyone falls sick of tertian or quartan fever, is to be bound on the patient’s body.[217] The heliotrope is not to be plucked at all but tied in three or four knots with a prayer that the patient may recover to untie the knots.[218] [Sidenote: Marvelous virtues of herbs.]