Pliny’s recipes and operations are mainly connected with either medicine or agriculture, but he also introduces as we have seen magical procedure employed in child-birth, safeguards against poisons and reptiles, and counter-charms against sorcery. He more than once avers that love-charms (_amatoria_) lie outside his province,[438] in one passage alleging as a reason that the illustrious general Lucullus was killed by one,[439] but he includes a great many of them nevertheless.[440] Some herbs are so employed because of a resemblance in shape to the sexual organs,[441] another instance of association by similarity. Pliny declared against abortive drugs as well as love-charms,[442] but cited from the _Commentaries_ of Caecilius one recipe for birth-control for the benefit of over-fecund women, consisting of a ligature of two little worms found in the body of a certain species of spider and bound on in deer-skin before sunrise. After a year the virtue of this charm expires.[443] [Sidenote: Pliny and astrology.] Pliny devotes but a small fraction of his work to the stars and heavens as against terrestrial phenomena, and therefore has less occasion to speak of astrology than of magic. However, had he been a great believer in astrology he doubtless would have devoted more space to the stars and their influence on terrestrial phenomena. He recognizes none the less, as we have seen, that magic and astrology are intimately related and that “there is no one who is not eager to learn his own future and who does not think that this is shown most truly by the heavens.”[444] Parenthetically it may be remarked that the general literature of the time only confirms this assertion of the widespread prevalence of astrology; allusions of poets imply a technical knowledge of the art on their readers’ part; the very emperors who occasionally banished astrologers from Rome themselves consulted other adepts. In another passage Pliny speaks of men who “assign events each to its star according to the rules of nativities and believe that God decreed the future once for all and has never interfered with the course of events since.”[445] This way of thinking has caught learned and vulgar alike in its current and has led to such further methods of divination as those by lightning, oracles, haruspices, and even such petty auguries as from sneezes and shifting of the feet. Furthermore in Pliny’s list of men prominent in the various arts and sciences we find Berosus of whom a statue was erected by the Athenians in honor of his skill in astrological prognostication.[446] In another place where he speaks for a moment of “the science of the stars” Pliny disputes the theories of Berosus, Nechepso, and Petosiris that length of human life is ordered by the stars, and also makes the trite objection to the doctrine of nativities that masters and slaves, kings and beggars are born at the same moment.[447] He also is rather inclined to ridicule the enormous