AQUA MAGNANIMITATIS.--Take of ants or pismires a handful of their eggs two hundred, of millepedes (wood-lice) two hundred, of bees two hundred and fifty; digeste them together, the space of a month, then pour off the clear spirit, and keep it safe. This water or spirit is of the same value as the former.[112] But, quitting these "fond conceits," as honest old Burton[113] calls them, and investigating the subject upon acknowledged and recognised principles, it will be found that, as the ancient philosophers and naturalists regarded the semen as the purest and most perfect part of our blood, the flower of our blood and a portion of the brain, so the sole object of all aphrodisiacal preparations should be to promote its copious secretion. Before, however, proceeding to indicate the means most conducive thereto, it may prove interesting to the reader to be informed what were the opinions of some of the most celebrated philosophers of antiquity, upon the semen. "Let us first," says Montaigne,[114] "know whether, at least, all they (physicians) agree about the matter whereof men produce one another.... Archesilaus, the physician, whose favourite and disciple Socrates was, said that men and beasts were formed of a lacteous slime, expressed by the heat of the earth. Pythagoras says that our seed is the foam or cream of our better blood. Plato, that it is the distillation of the marrow of the back-bones; and raises his argument from this: that that part is first sensible of being weary of the work. Alcmeon, that it is a part of the substance of the brain, and that it is so, says he, is proved by its causing weakness of the eyes in those who are over-immoderately addicted to that exercise. Democritus, that it is a substance extracted from soul and body. Aristotle, an excrement drawn from the aliment of the last blood which is diffused over all our members; others, that it is a blood concocted and digested by the heat of the genitals." But, to return from this digression. Under whatever point of view the _semen verile_ be considered, whether as containing, according to some physicians, all the parts of the fœtus, under the name of organic molecules, or as being, in the opinion of others, merely destined to fecundate the female egg, it will be equally true that the semen is a fluid impregnated with a vivifying principle regarded as the most important (_validissimum_) of our humours, by Hippocrates, who, in support of this his opinion, adduces the fact of our becoming debilitated, however small the quantity we may lose of it in the venereal act.[115] Zeno, the father of the Stoic philosophy, called the loss of semen the loss of part of the animating principle; and that sage's practice was conformable with his principles, for he is recorded to have embraced his wife but once in his life, and that out of mere courtesy.