blood and crushes the dragon who is intoxicated by the same. [Sidenote: Remedies discovered by animals.] The dragon’s apparent knowledge that the elephant is cold-blooded leads us to a kindred topic, the remedies used by animals and often discovered by men only by seeing animals use them. This notion continued in the middle ages, as we shall see, and of course it did not originate with Pliny. As he says himself, “The ancients have recorded the remedies of wild beasts and shown how they are healed even when poisoned.”[267] Against aconite the scorpion eats white hellebore as an antidote, while the panther employs human excrement.[268] Animals prepare themselves for combats with poisonous snakes by eating certain herbs; the weasel eats rue, the tortoise and deer use two other plants, while field mice who have been stung by snakes eat _condrion_.[269] The hawk tears open the hawkweed and sprinkles its eyes with the juice.[270] The serpent tastes fennel when it sheds its old skin.[271] Sick bears cure themselves by a diet of ants.[272] Swallows restore the sight of their young with chelidonia or swallow-wort,[273] and the historian Xanthus says that the dragon restores its dead offspring to life with an herb called _balis_.[274] The hippopotamus was the original discoverer of bleeding,[275] opening a vein in his leg by wounding himself on sharp reeds along the shore, and afterwards checking the flow of blood by plastering the place with mud.[276] Pliny, however, states in one passage that animals hit upon all these remedies by chance and even have to rediscover them by accident in each new case, “since,” he continues in conformity with recent animal psychologists, “reason and practice cannot be transmitted between wild beasts.”[277] [Sidenote: Jealousy of animals.] Yet in another passage Pliny deplores the spitefulness of the dog which, while men are looking, will not pluck the herb by which it cures itself of snake-bite.[278] Probably Pliny is using different authorities in the two passages. Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle, had written a work on _Jealous Animals_. More excusable than the spitefulness of the dog is the attitude of the dragon, from whose brain the gem _draconitis_ must be taken while the dragon is alive and preferably asleep. For if the dragon feels that it is mortally wounded, it takes revenge by spoiling the gem.[279] Elephants know that men hunt them only for their tusks, and so bury these when they fall off.[280] [Sidenote: Occult virtues of animals.]