This is not perhaps the place to enter at length on a discussion of the Herodotean usage of νόμος, or its relation with its correlative φύσις. But it can hardly be passed by without the remark that the varying use of the word in Herodotus--and his uses do vary in detail--are all included in that earlier, and characteristically Ionian sense, in which the word is used to denote the formal expression of _what actually happens_, among the people, and in the circumstances, which are in question. This is of course a quite immediate, and very early sense of the word; it connects itself directly with the primary signification of a _pasture_ within which a flock may roam unchecked and unharmed, but beyond which it strays at its peril or not at all. Νόμος has thus exactly the force of the Roman conception of a _provincia_, except that where provincia _prescribed_ the limits and the character of appropriate acts, νόμος merely _described_ them. In so far then as νὁμος answered originally to our word _law_, it answered exclusively to that sense of it in which we speak of a _law of nature_, meaning thereby our more or less accurate formulation, in a descriptive way, of the actual course of events of the given type. In this sense obviously there is no contrast or antagonism conceivable between νόμος and φύσις. Let the φύσις of an oak, for example--the growth-process of that kind of tree--be to put forth branches, leaves, and fruit of a specific sort: this is no less the νόμος of that oak; the way it normally behaves. So, too, with Man. The normal, natural behaviour of the Egyptian is to teach his son a trade, this is one of his νόμοι, as seen and described by an observer from outside; but this is also what he and his ancestors have done φύσει for generations, till an Egyptian who does otherwise is hardly conceivable. We have already seen in the case of Hippocrates the mode of procedure whereby what began as a νόμος was conceived as modifying the φύσις by incorporation in it.