There is furthermore sympathy and antipathy between animate and inanimate objects. So marvelous is the antipathy of the tamarisk tree for the spleen alone of internal organs, that pigs who drink from troughs of this wood are found when slaughtered to be without spleen, and hence splenetic patients are fed from vessels of tamarisk.[366] The spleenless pig, it may be interpolated, is another commonplace of ancient and medieval science. Smearing the hives with cow dung kills other insects but stimulates the bees who have an affinity for it (_cognatum hoc iis_),[367] probably, although Pliny does not say so, on the theory that they are spontaneously generated from it. That the wild cabbage is hostile to dogs is evidenced by the statement of Epicharmus that it cures the bite of a mad dog but kills a dog if he eats it when given to him with meat.[368] Snakes hate the ash-tree so, that if they are hemmed in by its foliage on one side and fire on the other, they flee by preference into the flames.[369] Betony, too, is so antipathetic to snakes that they lash themselves to death when a circle of it is drawn about them.[370] Scorpions cannot survive in the air of Sicily.[371] Perhaps antipathy is also the explanation of Pliny’s absurd statement that loads of apples and pears, even if there are only a few of them, are very heavy for beasts of burden.[372] Here, however, the condition may be remedied and perhaps a relationship of sympathy established by showing the beasts how few fruit there really are or by giving them some to eat. That sympathy may even attach to places or religious circumstances Pliny infers from the belief that the priestess of the earth at Aegira, when about to descend into the cave and predict, drinks without injury bull’s blood which is supposed to be a fatal poison.[373] [Sidenote: Like cures like.] That like cures like, or more precisely and paradoxically that the cause of the disease will cure its own result, is another notion which Pliny’s medicine shares with magic. This is seen in the use of parts of the mad dog to cure its bite,[374] or in rubbing thighs chafed by horse-back riding with the foam from a horse’s mouth.[375] The bite of the shrew-mouse, too, is best healed by imposition of the very animal which bit you, but another shrew-mouse will do and they are kept ready in oil and mud for this purpose.[376] The sting of the _phalangium_ may be cured by merely looking at another insect of that species, whether it be dead or alive.