The virtues, especially medicinal, of plants and animals comprise the contents of a work in Latin of uncertain date and authorship, usually called the _Kiranides_ of Kiranus, King of Persia.[699] Thomas Browne, in his _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_ or _Inquiry into Vulgar Errors_, included in his list of “authors who have most promoted popular conceits, ... _Kiranides_, which is a collection out of Harpocration the Greek and sundry Arabick writers delivering not only the Naturall but Magicall propriety of things, a work as full of vanity as variety, containing many relations, whose invention is as difficult as their beliefs, and their experiments sometime as hard as either.”[700] The work purports to be a translation from the Greek version which in its turn was from the Arabic,[701] and Berthelot affirms[702] that in antiquity _Kiranides_ was cited by Galen and by Olympiodorus, the historian and alchemist of the early fifth century, while Kroll cites a Greek manuscript at Paris as ascribing the third book of _Kiranides_ to Hermes Trismegistus.[703] [Sidenote: Its prefaces.] The preface of the medieval Latin translator is by “a lowly cleric” who addresses some ecclesiastical or scholastic superior, possibly the Chancellor at Paris.[704] He marvels that the mind of his patron, which has penetrated beyond the seven heavens to contemplate supernatural things above our sphere, should nevertheless not disdain an interest in the most lowly of terrene “experiments.” The master has asked him to translate this medical book from Greek into Latin, a task easier to ask than to execute. There are several Greek versions of it, all professedly translations from some oriental original, but the volume which his patron gave him to translate into Latin is that translated into Greek at Constantinople in 1168[705] or 1169[706] by order of the Byzantine emperor, Manuel Comnenus, whom we shall also find associated with the _Letter of Prester John_ of which we shall treat in the next chapter. The translator speaks of the work as _The Book of Natural Virtues, Complaints, and Cures_, but adds that it is a compilation from two other books, namely, _The Experience of the Kiranides of Kiranus, King of Persia_, and _The Book of Harpocration[707] of Alexandria to his Daughter_. There then follows the preface of Harpocration to his daughter, which tells of a certain city and of encountering an aged sage there, of great towers and of precious writing on a column which Harpocration proceeds to transcribe. We are given to understand that the original was written in “antique archaic Syriac” and was as old as the Euphrates. [Sidenote: Arrangement of the text.]