This relationship exists between animals,—deer and snakes, for example. So great a force is it that stags track snakes to their holes and extract them thence despite all resistance by the power of their breath. This antipathy continues after death, for the sovereign remedy for snake-bite is the rennet of a fawn killed in its mother’s womb, while serpents flee from a man who wears the tooth of a deer. But antipathy may change to sympathy, for Pliny adds that in some cases certain parts of deer treated in certain ways attract serpents.[360] This force of antipathy is indeed capable of taking the strangest turn. Bed-bugs, foul and disgusting as they are, heal the bite of snakes, especially asps, and sows can eat the poisonous salamander.[361] The antipathy between goats and snakes would seem almost as potent as that between deer and snakes,[362] since we are told that snake-bitten persons recover more quickly, if they frequent the stalls where goats are kept or wear as an amulet the paunch of a she-goat. [Sidenote: Love and hatred between inanimate objects.] There is also “the hatred and friendship of deaf and insensible things.”[363] Instances are the magnet’s attraction for iron and the fact that adamant can be broken only by the blood of a he-goat, two stock examples of occult influence and natural marvels which continued classic in the medieval period.[364] Pliny indeed regards this last as the clearest illustration possible of the potency of sympathy and antipathy, since a substance which defies iron and fire, nature’s two most violent agents, yields to the blood of a foul animal.[365] [Sidenote: Sympathy between animate and inanimate objects.]