Pliny appears to have much less faith in the possession of marvelous virtues by gems than by herbs and parts of animals. He not only characterizes the powers attributed to gems by the _magi_ and Democritus and Pythagoras as “terrible lies” and “unspeakable nonsense”;[333] but refrains from mentioning many such himself or inserts a cautious “if we believe it” or “if they tell the truth.”[334] Of the gem supposed to be produced from the urine of the lynx he says, “I think that this is quite false and no gem of that name has been seen in our time. What is stated concerning its medicinal virtue is also false.”[335] To other stones, however, he ascribes various medicinal virtues, either when taken pulverized in drink or when worn as amulets.[336] A few other occult properties are stated without reservation, as that _amiantus_ resists all sorceries,[337] that adamant expels idle fears from the mind, that _sideritis_ produces discord and litigation, and that _eumeces_, placed beneath one’s pillow at night, causes oracular visions.[338] Magnets are said to differ in sex, and the belief of Theophrastus and Mucianus is repeated that certain stones bear offspring.[339] [Sidenote: Other minerals and metals.] Of the metals iron sometimes figures in Pliny’s magical procedure, as when he either prescribes or taboos the use of it in cutting herbs or killing animals. In Arcadia the yew-tree is a fatal poison to persons sleeping beneath it, but driving a copper nail into the tree makes it harmless.[340] Pliny says that gold is medicinal in many ways and in particular is applied to wounded persons and to infants as a safeguard against witchcraft.[341] Earth itself is often used to work marvels, but usually some particular portion, such as that between cart ruts or that thrown up by ants, beetles, and moles, or in the right footprint where one first heard a cuckoo sing.[342] However, the rule that an object should not touch the ground is enforced in many other connections[343] than the plucking of herbs, and Pliny twice states that the earth will not permit a serpent who has stung a human being to re-enter its hole.[344] In his discussion of metals Pliny does not allude to transmutation or alchemy, unless it be in his accounts of various fraudulent practices of workers in metal and how Caligula extracted gold from orpiment. But the following directions for preparing antimony show how closely akin to magic the procedure in ancient metallurgy might be. The antimony should be coated with cow-flap and burnt in furnaces, then quenched in woman’s milk and pounded in mortars with an admixture of rain-water.[345] [Sidenote: Virtues of human parts.]